James Forsyth James Forsyth

Three mistakes the UK made at the start of the corona crisis

Boris Johnson (photo: Getty)

There are three areas where government policy now implicitly accepts that they made mistakes in their earlier handling of the pandemic. The first is the desire to increase testing to 200,000 tests a day. This suggests that the earlier decision to pull back from a test and trace strategy because the infection was being spread in the community was due to a lack of a testing capacity; something that could have been remedied if the government and Public Health England had adopted the collaborative approach to testing that they now have.

The second is care homes. It is now clear that the policy of discharging people from hospitals into care homes without waiting for a negative Covid-19 test first was a massive mistake that has made the situation in care homes far worse than it otherwise would have been.

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