Covid Inquiry: Scotland's former Chief Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood's alarming evidence should worry us all – Scotsman comment

Fixing the health service is vital to protecting us all against major threats to public health

Former Chief Medical Officer Dr Catherine Calderwood may have been forced to resign for breaking her own Covid lockdown rules – which she did gracefully, unlike some, saying she was “truly sorry” and had “no excuses” – but her medical expertise remains valuable. Giving evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry in London, Calderwood said that the Scottish Government had failed to learn from the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which has been described as the first pandemic of the 21st century.

Countries like Singapore that were particularly hard hit by this virus had teams on standby to set up testing centres and begin contact tracing as soon as Covid hit, Calderwood told the inquiry. However, in Scotland, she said: “We were late and slow. There wasn't a formal or co-ordinated way to communicate with other countries and we could have learned more rapidly.”

Sars killed nearly ten per cent of the people who became sick, but the total number of confirmed worldwide infections was 8,098. However, while this may not have sounded alarm bells, leading virologists did warn that a major pandemic was a risk. Twenty years on, there have been more than 767 million Covid cases and 7.9 million deaths. And the risk of another pandemic remains.

Alarmingly, Calderwood suggested Scotland could be caught out again, as NHS staff shortages were making it “extremely, extremely difficult” to plan for a future major outbreak because of the difficulty in finding people with the time to attend training exercises.

If this is true of planning for a pandemic – when we now know how serious they can be – then it is likely to also be true for other important, longer-term issues that require some time away from the daily grind.

All of which should put the current crisis affecting the NHS – epitomised by over-long waiting lists for treatment and staff shortages – even higher on the political agenda. As we said yesterday on its 75th birthday, politicians must act urgently to fix the health service. The lives of us all, including those with private health insurance, may depend upon it.