Chris Whitty has told the Covid inquiry that some onlookers might say the UK overstated the risk that the virus posed to the public at the start of the pandemic.
Prof Whitty, the UK’s chief medical officer, said he still worries about whether the government and its advisers found the right balance between public protections and personal freedoms.
He said: “I was worried at the beginning. I still worry, actually in retrospect, about whether we got the level of concern right,” he said.
“Were we either over pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where in fact, their actuarial risk was low, or we were not pitching it enough and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into.
“I think that balance is really hard, and arguably, some people would say we, if anything we overdid it, rather than under [at] the beginning.”
But he said that the arguments against widespread Covid restrictions were “obviously not true”, and said that they should not be followed in any future pandemic – “unless you can demonstrate it.”
He added: “I think we probably should have been swifter off the mark in spotting long Covid as it emerged, although I think we were relatively quick and it wasn’t obvious, we could have done something different as a result.
“The main thing we could do at the beginning, before we understood it slightly better, was to reduce the amount of Covid. If you don’t get Covid, you don’t get long Covid.”
Discussing the shielding of elderly and vulnerable people, Prof Whitty said the policy had pluses and minuses.
He said: “I think it was beneficial in one way, harming another way, and uncertain in a third.”
Asked if he would consider a similar approach in a future pandemic, he added: “There are two things I would definitely do. I think shielding, I’m unsure about, it would depend on the situation.
“I definitely think that the risk classification is really important because there are many other things that flow from them. And indeed, you don’t know what will flow from them always when you do it.
“And secondly, I do think it’s important to put in place a mechanism to support people who rationally have chosen to take themselves out of society, to better their ability to protect themselves.
“Whether the particular approach to shielding we took is an appropriate one to use, again, in respiratory infection, I honestly don’t know.”
Prof Whitty was also asked about the use of FFP3 masks and FRSM masks (fluid-resistant surgical masks) at the Covid-19 Inquiry on Thursday.
Inquiry counsel Jacqueline Carey said that when the virus was declassified as a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in March 2020, guidance from UK Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) “effectively said FFP3s for AGPs (aerosol generating procedures), or hotspots where AGPs are going to be done, FRSM in the other areas”.
She asked: “Do you think that was perceived by some in the profession as a downgrading of PPE that was required?”
Prof Whitty said: “I’m very confident you find some people who thought that was a downgrading, but I think most people would see that as a quite normal sequence.
“They may or may not agree with it, but they would see that as, it’s not a sort of downgrading, it’s simply a move from an HCID to an infectious disease, for which you have standard precautions for that level of risk.”
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Ms Carey asked if he thought “that message was sufficiently well communicated to healthcare workers”.
Prof Whitty replied that it was not his area of expertise, but added: “I think that this is a recommendation I would invite the inquiry to consider.
“I think that the messaging near the beginning of this was quite confused.
“And I think the reason that it was confused was it was not entirely clear who was ultimately responsible for making decisions in this fast-moving situation.”
He added: “I think that quite a lot of people thought they were partially responsible, and that’s always an extremely difficult and dangerous situation to find yourself in.
“So it wasn’t that people were trying to walk away from responsibility, but the quite complex system by which Public Health England, as it then was, the infection control cell, NHS delivery of various things, were interacting – and that’s before we get into issues of procurement and distribution, which had a separate set of challenges – I think works fine if you’re changing every six months or so in a reasonably measured way, up against the speed of changes that were needed, I think it led to uncertainty.
“It wasn’t deliberate in any sense, and it wasn’t anybody, as I say, trying to walk away from responsibility, but uncertainty as to who finally was actually trying to both call this and communicate it.”
Prof Whitty said one of the things which “we got wrong” during the early stages of the pandemic was communication between people giving infection control guidance and those working on the frontline.
He added: “It is sensible to say to people: ‘Our advice is professionally, we don’t think this makes a difference, but if you feel this is important for your particular situation, this is available for you’. And that might have been tricky right at the beginning because of what was available in the country at that point.”
He said that he did not use FFP3 masks when he was on the wards with people with Covid-19, adding: “My view about this is the guidance is usually there for a perfectly logical set of reasons.
“I did what I what was recommended, not out of the point of principle, but just because I think: ‘Fine, that’s what the experts have recommended. I’m comfortable with that.’
“But people clearly weren’t comfortable, and that that was our failure, was the fact people did not feel, for understandable reasons, comfortable.”
