The face of the Covid Pandemic Sir Chris Whitty has told the COVID inquiry that the lack of ICU units back in the spring of 2020 was a political choice
“Taking ICU, in particular, the UK has a very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peer nations in high income countries. Now that’s a choice, that’s a political choice.” he told the inquiry
He said that the UK had gone into the pandemic with a “very low” number of beds compared with other wealthy countries.
He added that a lack of staffing capacity made it more difficult for health leaders to scale up intensive care units.
“You can buy beds, you can buy space, you can even put in oxygen. And I think we learned some lessons from, for example, trying to set up the Nightingale hospitals, about the difficulties of doing that,”
Giving evidence Whitty says ‘arguably’ the government ‘overdid’ the warnings about risks from Covid at the start.“
“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.”
On the surge in mental health issues among children and young people
“very serious issue..We need to have a very clear view on this, whether this is something which is going to revert back to the trend line that was there before, or is this something which has actually been a step change and which is now with us for a long period of time, and that has quite different implications as to how we configure [mental health] services”
