Your article on planning for a strategy to exit from lockdown (UK government has no exit plan for Covid-19 lockdown, say sources, 15 April) was highly significant, particularly in highlighting the reluctance of ministers to respond to growing calls for their thinking on any potential strategies to be published.
Despite their efforts to rewrite history, evidence from meetings of the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) and the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group (Nervtag) all the way up to mid-March shows clearly that the scientific evidence was, at various times, either confused or delivered to ministers with insufficient clarity. As a result those ministers then made fundamental mistakes, which meant we lost valuable time to prepare for the epidemic, in particular by locking down the country much earlier.
To make matters worse, the decision announced on 12 March to abandon community testing and tracing, almost certainly because we no longer had sufficient capacity to do it, has undoubtedly cost a huge number of lives in the UK. Nearly 14,000 have died so far, compared with under 4,000 in Germany – a larger country than us, but one that never stopped testing and tracing.
The reality now is that we don’t even know who all the people are who are advising the government, let alone what advice they are giving. That advice needs to be published so that all of us, and especially parliament, can interrogate it to ensure that it is robust and that important factors have not been overlooked.
Lobby journalists have done their best, but we have to hope that the return of parliament will mean that the government and its advisers are made to be a good deal more accountable than they are required to be in their daily press briefings.
Chris Dunne
London
• The suggestion that we should repeatedly flip-flop between lockdown and relaxation (Coronavirus distancing may need to continue until 2022, say experts, 14 April) is dangerous nonsense. Denmark and Greece, among others, have shown what must be done. Lock down fast, hard, long, and once and for all. Wait until new coronavirus cases have fallen to a trickle. Only then let everyone go back to work and socialise, when there is very little virus left to spread. With the economy finally back to firing on all cylinders, keep the virus in check with rigorous testing, tracking, isolation and border control. Our government failed its first test. Its second test will be to resist pressures to lift lockdown too early.
David Allen
Kinoulton, Nottinghamshire
• This government is obsessed with drawing parallels between Covid-19 and the second world war. Odd, therefore, that ministers can’t see that in claiming it’s too early for an exit strategy, they are aligning with those short-sighted strategists who said the Beveridge report on rebuilding and improving health and social services would be a distraction. It wasn’t. It was an inspiration.
Dr Colin J Smith
West Kirby, Wirral
• In 1945, the allied powers showed they could contemplate the future even during the darkest days of the war. Less than one month after the last V2 landed in Orpington, Kent, delegates from 50 nations had already arrived in San Francisco to agree the organisation of the new United Nations. Preparation is as important as timing. By engaging our well-educated and well-informed society in this debate, we can all become part of the solution.
David Wardrop
Chair, Westminster United Nations Association
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