Delay to Covid public inquiry is shameless – Yorkshire Post Letters

IT is high time for a full public inquiry over the Government’s conduct during the pandemic.

In July, scientists from Imperial College London warned the Government that the second wave of Covid infections could result in up to 119,000 hospital deaths.

In September, the Sage committee recommended Ministers to introduce a brief circuit breaker.

However, they delayed until November, which scientists from Imperial College say increased infections by 1.3 million.

In an assessment by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this resulted in 8,000 deaths which could 
have been avoided by earlier action.

The Government again ignored advice from Sage by lifting the November lockdown. The UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care say that “tens of thousands of avoidable deaths is a conservative estimate of the consequences of lifting this lockdown in the run-up to Christmas”. Clearly, the Government’s claim to be “following the science” was a blatant lie, as nothing had been learned from the experience of the first wave of infections.

Any responsible Prime Minister would already have launched a full public inquiry with a timely reporting deadline. Instead, Boris Johnson has scheduled a report that would not be published until after the next general election (The Yorkshire Post, May 31). This is shameless and dishonest. If Johnson has nothing to fear, then why the cover-up?

From: Roger Backhouse, Upper Poppleton, York.

THE revelations by Dominic Cummings sound like the discredited in pursuit of the disreputable. Although the Barnard Castle trip ruined his credibility the Prime Minister kept him in place, perhaps he was then just too useful. How curious that Conservative MPs and the Prime Minister are now lining up to rubbish him.

As Dominic Cummings was at Government’s heart in the early days of Covid, most of what he says should be taken seriously.

The appalling way patients moved untested from hospital to care homes cost many lives. Warnings from those who knew the social care sector, like your correspondent Mike Padgham (The Yorkshire Post, May 31 and June 1), went unheeded.

While there are many culprits, those at the top must take the blame. No wonder Britain’s death rate from Covid is one of the worst in Europe.

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