The CV19 Heroes Project reflections on the Covid Inquiry Module 2 Report
Last Thursday we saw the publication of the second report from the UK Covid Inquiry, which summarised what many of our participants had been thinking back in 2020. The summary line of the report from this module (“Core decision making and political governance”) was that the action of the various governments in the UK was “too little, too late”. Amongst the most stark and sobering findings of the inquiry so far was that had the governments implemented lockdown just one week earlier, we would have seen 23,000 fewer deaths in the first wave of Covid.
On top of this, the report highlighted the issue with messaging from policymakers. The increasing complexity of restrictions, the changing of policies, and the variation of rules across the four nations of the UK (and sometimes regions within those nations) were cited as being key issues for public understanding of the regulations, and therefore their compliance. Not only this, but the report stated “Allegations of rule breaking by ministers and advisers caused huge distress and undermined public confidence in their governments”, causing further problems with public compliance with pandemic regulations. These findings are all echoes of what we have been told by our participants since we started collecting data in March 2020.
Our participants identified very early on that the lockdowns were started too late, eased too early, and then reinstated too late in the surge of the Winter period of 2020/2021. Our participants also identified that the impact of the first lockdown was undermined by the “eat out to help out” campaign of the summer of 2020, where the public were encouraged to go to restaurants and bars, some of the few locations where mask-wearing was exempt at that time. We carried out interviews with participants from a variety of frontline sectors across the UK and collected free text data through our online surveys, producing academic papers and reports for the UK government that demonstrated that frontline workers from across all sectors understood these failings and felt the impact keenly.
We also focused in on some of the impact of the widely publicised rule breaking by political figures. Our participants identified how this behaviour undermined public health messaging, leaving the public embittered and resentful of double standards, effectively sanctioning rule breaking. This started off a series of highly publicised events across the UK of rule breaking, which our participants described as “a kick in the teeth” when they were working so hard under extremely difficult conditions.
Finally, the general lack of preparedness across governments in the UK has been reported to be a key contributor to the devastation that the pandemic has caused across the UK, in terms of deaths and disease, but also in terms of social and economic impact. The lack of preparedness was strongly highlighted in our first interview study, with participants very clearly able to identify where these failings were causing the most strain in the systems in which they worked. It is encouraging to see that the outcome report of this module of the inquiry has given some very strong and clear recommendations on how governments should shore up their pandemic preparedness for the future.
We are not surprised by the findings of this latest report from the Inquiry, but we are pleased to see that what we have been trying to communicate through our work for the past five years has formally been made record through their work. This has not been the first pandemic in living memory and it will not be the last. Learning lessons from Covid is the best way to honour the immeasurable loss and suffering experienced by everyone, and we are pleased to see the excellent and thorough work of the Inquiry being brought to the public’s attention. We are still continuing to produce work from the CV19 Heroes Project, and with the wealth of data we have, we will be producing reports and analyses for the foreseeable future. To read our existing scientific reports and reports to policymakers, go to our “publications” section on our website: www.cv19heroes.com
CV19 Heroes Project 