The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic while senior health officials were diverted to plan for a “no deal Brexit” – ultimately killing more people when Covid struck, the first report of the Covid-19 Inquiry has found. The Government’s sole pandemic strategy from 2011 was outdated, focused only on flu and had been virtually abandoned by the time the first wave of Covid arrived in early 2020. Politicians and officials were oblivious to the risks and consequences of a global pandemic while the structures responsible for emergency planning were “labyrinthine in their complexity”, the first module of the public inquiry, called Resilience and Preparedness, concluded.

Ministers also failed to appreciate the full extent of the impact government measures such as lockdown would have on ethnic minorities, the elderly and the vulnerable. People from some ethnic minority groups and those living in deprived areas had a significantly higher risk of being infected by Covid-19 and dying from it. Just under 227,000 people died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate.

“A lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight” in the years leading up to the pandemic likely cost more lives, the report found. In a damning piece of evidence Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Edinburgh, told the Inquiry: “We had not planned to introduce lockdown..

.there were no guidelines for when a lockdown should be.