Disgracefully, the Government covered up Exercise Alice – a coronavirus exercise which predicted the importance of isolating patients, contact tracing, PPE provision, trained personnel and adequate NHS beds.
The fact that Covid-19 is a novel type of coronavirus is irrelevant – every pandemic is different, but the lessons of Exercise Alice were generally applicable to coronaviruses including Covid-19, they were agreed by general consensus, and both political leaders and NHS England executives failed to implement that consensus.
They failed to maintain contact tracing capacity and isolate patients, they failed to provide adequate PPE, and they cut NHS beds.
