Covid Inquiry: 'Stay At Home' guidance became an unintended killer
The conclusion drawn by Baroness Hallett, the High Court judge charged with leading the Covid inquiry, is a macabre one: people died during the pandemic because they were told to stay at home to protect the NHS.
The responsibility for those additional deaths, the inquiry says, sits with the Cabinet Office that operated on behalf of Boris Johnson’s government, which drew up the guidance without any input from healthcare specialists or leaders.
Heart attacks, cancers and other deadly conditions claimed the lives of their victims because, out of a sense of duty towards others and to the NHS, people did not want to be a burden at a time of unimaginable demand at hospitals up and down the country.
As Mr Johnson has said previously, mistakes were made. The details set out in this, module three of the ten-module assessment that has cost more than £200m, clearly represent an unforeseen, unintended consequence of the use of messaging taken too literally by a British public desperate to do the right thing. Of equal concern in yesterday’s report is how close the NHS came to complete collapse; simply due to capacity, some patients had ‘do not resuscitate’ orders inappropriately imposed on them. Lady Hallett’s finding, that the NHS was simply overwhelmed, contradicts the Health Secretary of the day, Matt Hancock, who previously insisted the NHS was never overwhelmed.
Mr Hancock’s erroneous assessment remains an insult to the NHS staff who went to war with a virus that was killing quickly and indiscriminately. Those workers, people who go to work because they care, are the best of us and that is why it is mission-critical that Lady Hallett’s 10 recommendations do not sit on a shelf gathering dust. Just as the NHS was there for us when it mattered, we now need to be there for the NHS and its Herculean staff.