Exercise Cygnus

• Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, has told the recently opened COVID-19 Inquiry that the UK’s pandemic planning was “completely wrong”.
• While there is truth in this claim, it doesn’t give us the whole picture.
• In 2016, the UK government engaged in a series of exercises including Cygnus to assess their preparedness and response to a pandemic outbreak of influenza.
• Without effective vaccines, any attempt at herd immunity had to be abandoned as too many people would have died in the meantime.

Flawed assumptions

• Countries that had been significantly affected by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002–2004 – principally China but also other Asian countries – didn’t make the same mistake.
• In contrast, the UK lost valuable time between mid-February and mid-March while COVID cases and subsequent deaths were rapidly beginning to rise.

Poor planning

• Hancock’s statement raises a key question about the extent to which errors in the UK’s pandemic planning could have been foreseen at the time.
• Notably, the UK’s healthcare planning authorities could have taken a wider view of the potential nature of viral pandemics.
• Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to include the global re-emergence of a SARS-type virus as one of the possible, albeit more extreme, pandemic scenarios analysed in the UK’s planning exercises in 2016.
• Read more:
  How to prepare for a pandemic

  In sum, no planning exercise can cover all eventualities.