Despite clear signs of a rapidly spreading global pandemic, which NHS staff watched with horror as the world locked down, the UK death toll was rising with no restrictions in place.

Contact tracing was abandoned in early March 2020, and large gatherings continued to take place up until the end of that same month.

The Covid Inquiry report reveals that if the government had introduced the first lockdown a week earlier, 23,000 people in England alone would not have died.

DAUK’s Protect the Frontline campaign, collaborating with Led by Donkeys called for adequate PPE for NHS staff.

PPE supply

Thousands of doctors signed up to our NHSPPE app giving daily reports on the PPE supply they had access to. We also raised our concerns that staff were being discouraged from speaking up about PPE in the press.

Dr Ellen Welch, DAUK co-chair and author of How the NHS coped with Covid-19, said: “Frontline staff were left woefully unprotected by a lack of PPE, and DAUK provided a voice for doctors to speak up about this when many felt gagged by their trusts.

“We all saw colleagues don homemade PPE to go to care for patients and two months later nearly 300 healthcare workers had died.

“DAUK welcomes the recommendations of the inquiry and hopes lessons have been learned around the key theme of preparedness.

“Future pandemics will come and it would be an insult to those who lost their lives, or continue to live with long Covid, if we did not.”

Covid Airborne Transmission Alliance

DAUK is a member of the Covid-19 Airborne Transmission Alliance (CATA), which gave testimony as part of the inquiry about how UK healthcare officials systemically denied overwhelming scientific evidence that Covid-19 was airborne.

Watch CATA chair Dr Barry Jones giving evidence here.

Dr David Nicholl, consultant neurologist and DAUK committee member, said: “I was thinking how much of a media hullabaloo there was, rightly, over the Iraq War when there were 179 UK deaths, yet how quickly there has been a concerted action to move along from the pandemic by the media.

“There were more than 200,000 deaths from Covid, including hundreds of healthcare workers. Some like Boris Johnson clearly don’t want to learn.”

Dr Welch added: “As another winter takes hold, NHS staff approach it this year without the protection of the covid vaccine.

Covid Inquiry report

“The Covid-19 Inquiry report should serve as a reminder to those in power of the damage wielded by this virus, and urge them to start implementing measures now to protect staff and patients, such as vaccinations, masks, ventilation to name a simple few.

“Politicians may want to forgot this saga, but NHS staff never will.”

Dr Alison George, a GP and member of the DAUK GP committee, said: “NHS staff have been totally excluded from the vaccination programme and the cost to purchase one privately ranges from £95 to £99.

“There is no clear explanation for such an irresponsible and short-sighted decision.

Long Covid

“Added to the physical effects on individual staff of acute and long Covid, it is likely to lead to increased staff sickness, cancellation of procedures and treatments and higher rates of nosocomial Covid.

“It is also worth considering the impact of the message this sends to staff and the public about the need for any mitigations against Covid.”

DAUK committee members are volunteers and campaign about issues facing doctors in their own time. Please support our work by joining DAUK or donating to our GoFundMe.

Irresponsible and short-sighted

The committee said: “The decision to deny healthcare workers a free Covid vaccine this year is irresponsible and extremely short-sighted. “Healthcare workers are offered flu vaccines every year because we are at high risk of exposure to flu and to spreading it, so why are we now excluded from Covid vaccination, other than to save money in the very short term? “It will lead to increased staff sickness and put healthcare workers at risk of acute and long Covid. “It will also lead to higher rates of hospital-acquired Covid, cancelled operations and procedures impacting NHS capacity – all of which is likely to make the decision more expensive in the long run.

Covid vaccination

“As Covid is surging again, some NHS trusts have brought back mask mandates, yet we are expected to pay for vaccination ourselves at some expense. “The Government’s advice on vaccination states an ‘example price’ for a Covid vaccine of £25, but the cost of a private jab is between £75 and £99. “If the cost doesn’t put healthcare workers off getting one, then companies will be profiteering from the Government’s decision. “We would be very interested to know on what advice the decision was made.” The statement has been used by Doctors.Net.UK,

Short memories

Meanwhile DAUK co-chair Dr Ellen Welch, a GP based in Cumbria, has written on the issue on the DAUK Substack. She said: “We have very short memories when it comes to the Covid pandemic. We don’t want to remember, and understandably so. “But when it comes to minimising the damage of new Covid waves, and indeed any new diseases that come along in the future, we need to look at what did make a difference and implement that within our organisations.” Read Dr Welch’s Substack post in full. DAUK committee members are all volunteers and campaign about issues facing doctors in their own time. Please support our work by joining DAUK or donating to our GoFundMe.

CATA chair Dr Barry Jones gave evidence for 90 minutes at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

Support the work of the Doctors’ Association UK by becoming a member.

Date and time: Wed, 22 February 2023, 19:00 – 20:00 GMT, Online

As we mark the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, this webinar will explain the remarkable story of how the lessons of the PPE crisis of the early stages of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020, helped us design novel ways of arranging medical supplies.

Frontline Live is a U.K. charity set up by entrepreneurs and medics with a mission to help deliver medical supplies to our colleagues in Ukraine in the most efficient manner way possible. Come join the webinar to hear an inspiring story born of the pandemic and now crystallised in helping those most in need in Ukraine.

This event is open to both Doctors Association U.K. members and others.

The fabulous speakers for this event are –

David Nicholl is the Clinical Lead for Neurology at Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust where he has worked for over 20 years and is a committee member of the Doctors Association UK. He is the only medic amongst the Trustees of Frontline Live, and got involved when Frontline saw what they had learned from the first wave of the COVID pandemic. We looked to see where the same methods could be used in a different medical context, and then the war in Ukraine happened. he is a former winner of the BMJ Editors award for ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ Twitter @djnicholl

Katz Kiely is an award winning pioneer, digital transformation expert and culture architect. Over a 20 year career, she has world with the worlds biggest companies through lasting change including designing the first open innovation platform for HP, rearchitecting the way a UN agency works and prototyping a city scale behaviour change platform with Intel. She is now CEO of beep: a platform that embeds the mindsets and behaviours that drive customer centricity by unlocking the problem solving potential of people. She believes doing good is good business, is Chair of Trustees for Frontline.Live and a proud ambassador of the Burning Man Foundation.

Sacha Bunatyan is an advertising and marketing professional with over 20+ years of career in Global Publishing and Media businesses.Bunatyan is passionate about advancing the Ukrainian Victory by transporting humanitarian aid to support people on the ground in Ukraine and by assisting Ukrainian families here to assimilate while they are sheltering here in the UK.

Click here for free registration.

The Doctors’ Association UK criticised the plan for “soundbite generation” rather than “coherently and realistically” addressing workforce planning.

You can read the full article here.

Reducing the use of PCR tests will compromise the UK’s capacity to detect new coronavirus variants and put lives at risk, leading scientists have warned.

The Government is expected to announce the end of free Covid-19 testing for millions of people as part of its “Living Safely With Covid” strategy, due to be published next week.

Officials want to cut the ongoing costs of the pandemic as cases and deaths continue to fall. The changes are expected to come into force next month.

Healthy adults would no longer be eligible to order free lateral flow tests (LFT) on the NHS and PCR testing is expected to be limited to older adults and the clinically vulnerable, such as the 1.3 million people at highest risk from the virus. However, public health experts have raised concerns with the planned changes.

Lawrence Young, a virologist and professor of molecular oncology at the University of Warwick, said: “Living with Covid doesn’t mean ignoring the virus and letting our guard down. We still have high levels of infection in the UK and the pandemic continues to rage across the globe.

“We need to find a new normal where we maximise our freedoms while recognising that Covid will always be present rather than trying to return to a pre-pandemic world where Covid doesn’t exist.

“As long as the virus continues to spread and replicate, particularly in populations who are under-vaccinated, it will throw up new variants and these will remain a continual threat even to those countries with high rates of vaccination. Reducing the use of PCR will compromise our capacity to detect these new variants.”

The UK has been a world leader in its Covid-19 testing capability having carried out more than 463 million since the start of the pandemic. More than one million LFT and PCR tests a day have regularly been conducted this year, with the number dropping to less than 800,000 this week as cases fall.

Professor Young said: “You can’t control virus infection if you don’t know where the virus is spreading. This means planning for future surges of infection by ensuring we have the ability to rapidly detect outbreaks with targeted approaches to test, trace and isolate.

“Key to this is maintaining free access to lateral flow tests for all those with symptoms. The pandemic isn’t over and, if we’ve learned anything over the last two years, it’s that the impact and future of Covid-19 will remain unpredictable.”

Another 46,186 Covid cases were recorded in the UK on Tuesday, according to official Government figures – although a more accurate study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates the true number to be much higher.

The sharp difference in totals reflects the increasing limitations of the Government figures, which count only those people who have reported themselves as having tested positive for the virus. By contrast, the ONS figures are based on analysis of nose and throat swabs taken from a representative sample of more than 150,000 people in private households.

Separate ONS figures published on Tuesday revealed that Covid-19 deaths fell for the second week in a row in England, although they rose in Wales.

Dr Jonathan Stoye, of The Francis Crick Institute, accused the Government of “being driven by politics and economics rather than being driven by the science” in its response to the pandemic.

He said: “Even though the pandemic may appear to be ending, it has not yet ended. There are no guarantees that new, more pathogenic variants will not emerge. Despite the successes of vaccination, many people are still at risk. Any significant reduction in testing will jeopardise lives and compromise our ability to monitor the appearance of new variants.”

Dr Matthew Bigwood, an anaesthetist and spokesman for Doctors’ Association UK, said: “Given the lack of preparation around testing on all waves so far, can the Government show they are doing this to plan for future waves? Test and Trace failed each time. What will be different next time, especially in the light of not having started the Covid inquiry yet to identify previous mistakes?”

Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the Government had made “no decision” on changes to the current testing regime but that the policy was being kept “under review”.

He told LBC: “If we are in a better place with Covid there is no need to keep the same offer of testing forever, but testing will continue to play an important part in tackling Covid.”

Children are not meant to die, so when people say the risk of a child dying of Covid-19 is very small, then yes, it absolutely should be.

Unfortunately, we’ve been letting Covid spread quite freely in the UK, especially through schools. Children are now dying of Covid regularly, at a rate of about 2 or 3 per week. In fact, we’ve lost at least 133 children to Covid in the UK so far.

My child probably won’t die of Covid, and yours probably won’t either, but in the next few days, someone’s child will.

To put the numbers into context, in 2019 in England and Wales there were 907 deaths of children aged 1-15 in total.* We actively take precautions to prevent all of the commonest causes of child death, both as individuals and collectively.

Suffocation causes similar numbers of deaths to Covid, but no parent would leave plastic bags lying about, and almost all bags come with little holes punched in the bottom, and a written reminder to keep out of reach of children.

When it comes to Covid, though, the measures we had in place through the first two waves have largely been removed. Most adults in the UK are protected by at least two doses of vaccine, but most children are not. Masks stopped being required in English secondary schools in May, at roughly the same time that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) were concluding that “there was a low risk of child-to-child transmission”. Measures such as bubbles, distancing and isolation of covid contacts have also been removed or weakened since then, with predictable results.

For most of last term school aged children had the highest prevalence of Covid, and whenever schools are open, the rates tend to rise.

With the arrival of Omicron in the lead up to Christmas, schoolchildren were overtaken by young adults, extending up to the middle aged. Now that the new term has started, older age groups seem to have peaked, but schoolchildren and preschoolers continue to rise.

It has become clear that JCVI guidance suggesting the vaccine would only have minimal benefits for children was based on false assumptions. Children can and do transmit the virus when basic mitigation measures are removed.

The rapid spread of Omicron has lead to an unprecedented acceleration in children being admitted to hospital, at more than double the rate of previous waves. Similar patterns were seen in South Africa and New York, but it is still too early to say whether this increase in hospitalisation will translate into increased child mortality rates. The rates of Long Covid from Omicron are also still unknown.

Currently the UK lags behind similar nations in vaccinating children. The JCVI was slow to authorise vaccination of 12-15 year olds, initially only permitting a single vaccine.

The MHRA has approved a reduced dose vaccine for 5-11 year olds, but the JCVI are currently limiting its use to children who are Clinically Extremely Vulnerable (CEV) or have CEV members in their household. Even these few are struggling to actually access the vaccine, with reports of some families taking their children abroad to receive it. In contrast to the original adult vaccination campaign, and the booster programme this winter, vaccination of children has remained painfully slow. If vaccines are to be our main defence against covid, we need to step up the pace.

With school transmission driving the pandemic during term time, the rates of covid in parents and grandparents also tend to rise. The vaccine is very effective for most people, but it has a small but significant failure rate and not everyone can or will have it. If we choose to rely on vaccines alone, with rates this high, the virus will find those who
are susceptible.

For children with a clinically vulnerable parent or grandparent, the worry that they might bring Covid into the home is often their biggest fear. Children naturally tend to assume that bad things happening in the adult world are their fault, even in situations where there is far less logic to suggest it. In the UK, there are already an estimated eight thousand children orphaned by Covid-19. Those who argue that being in school is the most important factor for our children’s mental health are neglecting to consider these children. There is a huge difference between children being safely in school with multiple layers of mitigation measures in place, and children being in school where they are exposed to the virus with no protection.

The measures we need to make schools safe are quite simple:

• Fast vaccine roll-out for all children aged 5 and up.
• Acceptance that airborne spread of the virus is significant, ventilation, FFP2 masks, CO2 monitors and HEPA filters.
• Awareness that close contact also plays a part, with physical distancing where possible.
• Awareness that the number of people you transmit to depends on how many people you share air with, bringing back bubbles, avoiding assemblies, and a return to fully isolating cases and contacts.
• Acknowledging that children are connected to the rest of the community too, and a return to similar measures across the rest of society to get background Covid rates down.
• Perhaps the most complex measure, the one we are least likely to achieve, is a change to the public messaging about Covid in the UK. Because infections really do matter. We are all connected, and we do have a responsibility towards each other, whether we like it or not. My choices and actions could have unknown consequences for you, or for someone else, somewhere.

Consequences may be unknown, but they are not unforeseen. And in the case of infectious diseases, even a small change can make a very big difference over time, so every little helps. The actions that are in our power are smaller and simpler than those our government could have chosen, but they are still significant.

Open a few windows, wear a mask, keep your distance, stay home when you’re ill. You’ll never find out, but your actions could save the life of a child.