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We need a review of the first wave of coronavirus now before the second hits | Gaby Hinsliff | Opinion

 


When Boris Johnson gets caught, his first tendency is to squirm.

He squirms and stammers; if all else fails, he ruffles his hair like a chastised little boy and mumbles regretfully at his shoes. When confronted with the story of his affair with Petronella Wyatt, he withdrew behind claims about a piffle pyramid rather than admitting it was true.

When he hit a sticky patch with Brexit last fall, he decided to prorogue Parliament for five weeks rather than facing the music. He once indignantly described Tony Blair, after the latter emerged unscathed from a public inquiry into the alleged sexing of a file on Iraq, as a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He’s barely human in his elusive, but could just as easily have spoken of him. And it is precisely this gift of slipping into the hands of critics that means that Johnson must urgently present himself before a public inquiry.

Because, without one, history risks being rewritten before our incredulous eyes. There is rightly growing outrage at the thousands of people who died from coronaviruses in nursing homes, many of them after patients who had not been tested for Covid-19 were decanted out of hospitals desperately wanting to free beds. Grieving families deserve answers.

However, Johnson sought in the first place to blame the nursing homes and, when that was not washed, to suggest that what he really meant: We now know things about how coronavirus is passed from person to person without symptoms that we did not know. Really? The first stories of so-called asymptomatic transmission emerged from China in January; the scientific advisory body of Sage governments warned he could not be excluded in February; and professor of public health in England Yvonne Doyle describes this is a crucial question to be resolved in March. The World Health Organization, which was saying in early April that he had no proven reports of asymptomatic transmission, warned at the same time that this did not mean that it did not happen.

In other words, the ministers could and should have known at the very least that moving people from Covid-19 neighborhoods to the areas most in need of shelter from the virus, without testing them, was potentially dangerous. However, it takes so long to unravel stories like this that the Prime Minister usually galloped when the fact-finders caught up. If the truth is not to be lost in the weeds, we need a quick, independent and, most importantly, public review of what went wrong during this first wave of the pandemic and we need it before ‘a second does strike.

Everything indicates that No. 10 has already embarked on its own private post-mortem in recent months, but the danger is that the most difficult discoveries will never leave the building. Downing Street tells anyone who listens that the crisis has revealed a Whitehall machine unfit for use; thus leaves the secretary of the cabinet, Mark Sedwill.

There are also indications of a diminished role in the future for Sage, deemed too slow to understand at the outset that it was not the flu pandemic for which he had long prepared. But a government scoring its own homework like this does not leave us wiser as to whether the ministers are drawing the right conclusions from what happened or just the practices.

A full investigation by a judge, which takes years, costs millions and inevitably paralyzes governments, may have to wait until the pandemic ends. But the current lull in infections represents the best chance we have of taking stock before winter is upon us, and it is not good enough to say that an independent review would divert attention from the fight against the pandemic. If the government wanted to focus the laser on the virus to the exclusion of everything else, it should have taken the opportunity last month to extend the Brexit transition period. Having refused to do so, he can barely turn around and pretend he has not a minute to lose.

Since the lesson of public inquiries through the ages is that the truth is usually more complicated than people want, an impartial inquiry may well squeeze weaker government excuses while finding seeds of truth in it. other. Sage clearly signaled both the risk to nursing homes and the possible threat of asymptomatic transmission from the start, but, in hindsight, did he push the argument enough?

The debt of gratitude to caregivers in this crisis should not make us forget, for its part, that one in five nursing homes and one in seven homes are considered needing improvement or worse by the Care Quality Commission. It is fair to wonder how some of the houses that were wading in the best of circumstances have faced the unprecedented demands of a pandemic.

Yet the responsibility for all of this ultimately ends with the man who made the big strategic decisions, and now seems curiously reluctant to account for it. If this government has nothing to hide, it should have nothing to fear from delving into its thinking. But if he is not prepared to launch an investigation himself, Parliament should then seek to impose his hand on him, and quickly. There will be lessons to be learned from the first wave of this pandemic which could save lives for a second. No decent government would seek to avoid sharing them.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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