UK Covid-19 Inquiry finds early pandemic surveillance was weeks out of date
- Reference: 1763973066
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/24/covid_inquiry/
- Source link:
The two-volume report into the second set of UK Covid-19 Inquiry hearings found that data collection for the systematic NHS surveillance of the virus became available around March 8, 2020.
Despite every positive case being indicative of the underlying epidemic, John Edmunds, professor of infectious disease modeling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told the inquiry that the data was "very difficult to analyze."
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"There were delays of five to seven days between onset of cases and 'confirmation and entry onto the database' – although 'some cases were taking up to three weeks to be recorded.' There were significant caveats to, and uncertainties in, the data available," the report said.
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Edmunds told the inquiry: "New cases registered on a given day were actually reflecting infections that might have occurred two weeks earlier... We were estimating that there were hundreds or perhaps thousands of cases occurring every day."
In more than 750 pages, the second module of the inquiry report – there will be ten in total – details numerous failures in the government's response to the global pandemic.
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Lack of functioning data systems was also evident in measures of the health service's capacity to deal with the number of Covid cases.
Although statistics on bed availability had been published since 2000, in England it was recorded on a weekly basis, rather than as real-time data. Lord Simon Stevens, NHS England chief executive during the pandemic, said that before the second half of March 2020, "it was not possible automatically to 'pipe' real-time information on patient case mix and capacity" because of the limitations of existing hospital records and systems.
He said that NHS England's proposals to invest in more modern systems had been "repeatedly rejected or scaled back" and the lack of immediate access to data therefore "should not have come as a surprise to ministers," according to the inquiry report.
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The report also slams the lack of investment in public health and scientific research to deal with the impact of a pandemic.
[6]Palantir plots NHS skills drive for its controversial data platform
[7]Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers
[8]Jaguar Land Rover supply chain workers must get Covid-style support, says union
[9]Johnson, Cummings met Thiel months before Palantir won NHS pandemic role
It points out that funding constraints on Public Health England (PHE) affected its "ability to fulfill both its advisory and its operational functions."
"As was common across the four nations, there was, for example, no standing capacity for a scaled-up test and trace system. The resource constraints on Public Health England are illustrated by its £287 million budget for 2019/20, compared with the £37 billion allocated to NHS Test and Trace," the report said.
The Test and Trace program became heavily reliant on private sector consultants, with Deloitte, Serco, and IBM among the beneficiaries. According to a Parliamentary answer in 2021, the program hired more than 2,300 consultants and contractors working for 73 different suppliers [10]at a total cost of approximately £375 million .
Professor Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser at the time of the pandemic, told the inquiry: "The decisions taken over a number of years to reduce the science budget of PHE must have had an effect on its ability to perform at scale during the pandemic. The outsourcing of research to universities left PHE with restricted internal science and operational capability... It is important to view public health science funding as a resource that is required for the future, much in the same way as the army is required to be ready for action even when there is no war." ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/17/palantir_nhs_training_drive/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/24/google_reinstates_covid_misinfo_spreaders/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/15/covidstyle_furlough_schemes_for_jlr/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/10/johnson_cummings_thiel_meeting/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/06/uk_test_and_trace_consultants/
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Scamdemic
PS yes there was a disease, yes it did kill. Nearly always people that had some weakness, either age or health but numbers showed it was of the magnitude of bad flu years. Despite claims, Swedish stats were similar to everyone elses. The interventions made it worse not better.
Re: Scamdemic
numbers showed it was of the magnitude of bad flu years
If you pick your "bad flu year" as 1918, then influenza killed roughly twice as many people in the USA (per head of population) as Covid did in the following century. If you pick 2017-2018, which was considered an unusually bad year for flu compared to the average, around 50,000 US deaths were attributed to influenza. In 2020 and 2021, around 500,000 US deaths per year were attributed to Covid - an order of magnitude more.
In the absence of numbers, words like "bad" are meaningless.
Re: Scamdemic
"numbers showed it was of the magnitude of bad flu years"
The "bad flu years" immediately following WWI killed more people than the war had done.
Re: Scamdemic
When you say scam it sounds like you are suggesting a conspiracy. Looking at the evidence it looks more like a cock-up.
Wasting my taxes
The health world is full of busybodies who want to spend my taxes on more committees and more statistics. None of these will make actual people actually better. Then they will claim that because things are not getting better they are getting worse, and will demand even more of my taxes.
Re: Wasting my taxes
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Public health and its statistical approach is about prevention.
If you catch a disease the treatment to cure it may or may not be available depending on what you caught.
If you catch a disease for which a treatment is available it may or may not cure it because treatment's don't always work, they may be given too late, etc.
If you don't catch a disease you don't catch a disease. This is preferable to relying on treatment.
Just to be clear
Anti-vaxxers are scientifically ignorant and should be roundly ignored.
Thanks.
Scamdemic
The whole thing was a scam, not that many people will admit that because they either made lots of money, don't want to feel foolish or have political capital invested. If anyone bothered to track the data early on they would've realised. Probably the biggest scam ever and one which killed people unecessarily. But no doubt there will be lots of downvotes by people who did not track the raw data and believed the BBC and other vultures. Well if you're in that camp you are probably being taken in by other psycho manipulations. I can't wait for the aliens are attacking one which seems to be buidling up but is still lacking believers currently.
Here's a tip for those wanting a long and healthy life: Don't believe what they say on the news, eat healthy food without chemical additives, go outside, exercise, be very secptical of anyone claiming to care about you that isn't related.