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Dr Jenny Harries admits there were 'failings' in UK's covid response

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 April 2021
Published date01 April 2021
Publication titleMyLondon (England)
England's Deputy Chief Medical Officer has admitted there were 'failings' in UK's response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Jenny Harries, a regular at the Downing Street press conferences, has just been appointed chief executive of the new UK Health Security Agency UKHSA.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We were not fully prepared for this pandemic and, as I’ve said, I’m very happy to accept there is an awful lot to learn.

“I think we share some of those failings with many other countries.”

Dr said testing had not been stopped early on, but the issue was that more tests were needed.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We were using the 2,000 tests a day that we had – maximum – to save lives in the best way we could.”

She said there are now “hundreds of thousands of tests available”.

She added: “So, yes, it would have been good to have had more tests and, yes, we would have used them, but we’ve now processed, I think, nearly 90 million tests, so clearly a lesson has been learned and, I think, there are lots of opportunities going forward.”

Dr Harries also said face coverings would be recommended earlier, given what we now know about asymptomatic transmission.

Asked if the initial response to the pandemic was poor, she said: “I think it had merits and it had things that we would wish to improve.”

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that, while asymptomatic transmission had been “considered carefully”, the proportion of cases – now thought to be 30% – was not recognised.

“So obviously the response that we put in place and some of the interventions were not accounting for that high degree of numbers of asymptomatic cases, so I...

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