Lancet editor Richard Horton’s criticisms of the UK government’s response to coronavirus
by Ian Sinclair
1 April 2020
Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet, appeared on BBC Question Time on 26 March 2020 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000gpnd/question-time-2020-26032020), and made the following comments about the coronavirous outbreak in the UK:
Addressing shortages in the NHS: “It is a national scandal. We shouldn’t be in this position. We knew, from the last week in January [2020] that this was coming. The message from China was absolutely clear: that a new virus, with pandemic potential, was hitting cities, people were being admitted to hospital admitted to intensive care units, and dying. And the mortality was growing. We knew that eleven weeks ago. And then we wasted February when we could have acted. Time when we could have ramped up testing, time when we could have got Personal Protective Equipment ready and disseminated. We didn’t do it.”
Addressing the lack of testing: “This is one of the mysteries of the whole outbreak. When we knew this was coming late January/early February the standard public health approach to an epidemic is you, yes, test, test, test, and then in an infectious outbreak you isolate, you quarantine, you contact trace, you chase down every single contact and test that person too – to see if you can extinguish, stop the lines of transmission. And that’s the way you stop the outbreak. We didn’t do that. We forgot the most fundamental principles of outbreak control.”
Addressing Robert Jenrick MP, secretary of state for Housing, Communities and Local Government, about the government’s strategy: “The strategy we ended up following was that we wanted to get 60 percent of the population infected because we made the mistaken judgement that we thought it was a mild infection and we wanted herd immunity. And then you had the U-turn… that message changed ten days ago. In the early part of the epidemic it was not the case that the message was “Protect the NHS and save lives.” The message was “We are going to manage an epidemic in the population, get to 60 percent, get to herd immunity.” There are many, many examples of people on the record from the Chief Scientific Advisor to statisticians and modellers as part of SAGE [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] advising the government saying that was the objective. And then you stopped it when you realised that the NHS couldn’t cope with the intensive care burden.”
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