Covid-19 inquiry: Ministers abandoned public health principles during pandemic, says BMA chief

“Basic public health principles” ignored

At the start of the pandemic, Banfield said, the BMA was concerned that the government seemed to be abandoning “basic public health protection measures” such as testing, contact tracing, and helping people to self-isolate. “We couldn’t understand the decision to abandon contact tracing that was made on 11 or 12 March,” he told the inquiry. Stopping contact tracing and waiting 11 days until enforcing a lockdown “had a huge consequence,” because it led to more infections and greater pressure on the NHS, added Banfield, who succeeded Chaand Nagpaul as chair of BMA council in July 2022.

He said that the lack of testing capacity made it very hard to suppress the virus. Poor availability of PCR tests created staff shortages from people isolating even if they weren’t infected and raised the risk of nosocomial infections, he added. “In those early days . . . we were admitting patients to unsuitable areas with patients who hadn’t got covid. So the chance of passing covid around a hospital was very high.”

Early in the pandemic, he said, public health colleagues had highlighted the “risks of the disconnect between local health protection teams and NHS” and that data, essential to control the outbreak, didn’t reach the front line of care because of the separate systems.

Public health experts, including BMA members, “felt deeply disrespected” and ignored, with decisions being made at government level without their input, he added.

Disproportionate population effects

Banfield also noted the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on ethnic minority groups and other vulnerable groups. “The best phrase that I’ve heard was that we were all in the same storm but not in the same boat,” he said.

He said that “bias and discrimination” in the NHS contributed to the pandemic’s worse impact on black and Asian healthcare workers, with discrepancies in the way staff were treated and in their experiences. He said, “People from an ethnic [minority] background are less likely to seek out and be upheld with their risk assessments, they are less likely to be forthright about saying, ‘I need to have appropriate respiratory protective equipment,’ they are more likely to be posted to the front line and exposed to high risk cases. The recognition that that was the case emerged across the pandemic, and it has been recognised by the NHS.”

In the longer term, he said, “We need to make sure we narrow and resolve inequalities. This country cannot go on like this.”