COVID-19 Lockdowns ‘Damaged a Generation’: Former Chief Medical Officer

A member of staff wearing personal protective equipment takes a child's temperature at the Harris Academy's Shortland's school in London on June 4, 2020. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The interruption of education during COVID-19 lockdowns “damaged a generation,” England’s former Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dame Sally Davies has said.

Giving evidence to the COVID-19 Inquiry on Tuesday, Davies, who is now the master of Trinity College, Cambridge, said education “has a terrific amount of work to do” to mitigate the impact on children and students.

Davis was England’s CMO between March 2011 and September 2019, months before SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spread worldwide.

Answering questions on pandemic resilience and preparedness, the first module of the COVID-19 Inquiry that’s expected to last three years, Davis said it was “clear” no one had thought about lockdowns.

Since March 2020, British schools, nurseries, and universities were closed for months during national and regional lockdowns. After schools reopened, students and pupils also had to stay at home when they or their classmates tested positive for COVID-19.

Studies later found a range of negative impacts on children such as the rise of eating disorders and self-harm in teens, and retardation of early development in babies and toddlers.

Speaking of the impact, Davis said: “The damage I now see to children and students from COVID, and the educational impact, tells me that education has a terrific amount of work to do.

“We have damaged a generation and it is awful as head of a college in Cambridge watching these young people struggle,” she said.

“I know in pre-schools they haven’t learned how to socialise and play properly, they haven’t learned how to read at school. We must have plans for them.”

Davis said she still believes the first lockdown should have happened and should have been imposed “a week earlier,” but thoughts should have been given on whether further lockdowns should have happened.

Pressed on whether it was a “failure” that “the possibility of a lockdown itself was neither foreseen nor planned for,” she said: “Alright, I’m sorry. We didn’t plan for that.”

She said her team preferred to make plans to “not get us to that stage,” but “didn’t recognise ... something could get to that stage.” She also said they only planned for flu, which would peak within 12 to 16 weeks, not “something that was unremitting for a couple of years.”

Emotional Apology

Government ministers have previously said that they had prepared for the wrong pandemic. Former Prime Minister David Cameron also told the inquiry on Monday that it was a “mistake” that his government had spent “much more time” on a flu pandemic rather than looking more at the “range of different types of pandemic.”

Asked why the “long standing bias” had occurred and was allowed to continue, Davies said “the whole global north” thought “flu was the thing to focus on.”

But she defended preparing for flu, saying there will be more flu pandemics, “it’s only a question of when.”

“So for me the issue is not should we not prepare for flu, we must prepare for flu. The question is what else we do over and above that,” she said.

Davis said she did suggest a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) review, but was told the disease “won’t come here,” and had asked for a Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) practice.

“So I did put some challenge into it,” she said, before becoming emotional.

“But maybe this is the moment to say how sorry I am to the relatives who lost their families,” she said, fighting back tears.

“It wasn’t just the deaths, it was the way they died. It was horrible. And I heard a lot about it from my daughter on the front line as a young doctor in Scotland. It was harrowing, and it remains horrible,” she said.

Closing Borders

There was no discussion on how to prevent diseases from getting to the UK, partly because of World Health Organisation (WHO) rules, Davis told the inquiry.

“We worked on response and I do not remember a conversation about, so how do we stop it getting here,” she said, “in part because the international health regulations of the WHO, to which almost every country is signed up to, say that when a pandemic kicks off, you do not close the borders,” she said.

She also said Public Health England had said border closure was not “cost effective” when Cameron wanted to consider the move during an Ebola outbreak, adding, “and what I learned was, there are times when you have to do things that may not look cost effective, because the nation needs them.”

During the hearing, Davis also spoke of the lack of resilience in the UK’s health care system and in public health in general.

Compared to “similar countries,” the UK was “at the bottom of the table on number of doctors, number of nurses, number of beds, number of ICUs, number of respirators, ventilators” per 100,000 population, she said.

Regarding public health, “25 percent of children in year six are obese, 60 percent of adults are obese or overweight, [and] we have high levels of diabetes,” she said.