Covid was not initially a top priority
Before 20 March 2020 there had been an assumption that the UK government would be making the big decisions, but as it became clear that measures would fall under devolved health legislation, Welsh ministers realised they would be responsible.
Written evidence from Wales’s first minister Mark Drakeford also highlighted that covid was “not a top priority” until after February 2020. The inquiry also heard that NHS bosses in Wales had not been invited to initial Cobra meetings because of limits on attendance numbers.
Andrew Goodall, chief executive of NHS Wales for most of the pandemic and now the Welsh government’s permanent secretary, told the inquiry there was a change in response at the end of February with the first confirmed case in Wales acting as a trigger. In hindsight action should have been taken sooner, he said.
The inquiry also heard from Quentin Sandifer, the Public Health Wales (PHW) pandemic adviser who was “astonished” that by early March the Welsh government was not treating covid as an emergency. “At the beginning of March the Welsh government resilience team was telling us it didn’t think we were approaching—if we weren’t already there—a civil emergency.”
A briefing put together by PHW predicted Wales would see 1.5 million symptomatic cases, 200 000 cases requiring hospital admission, about 18 000 cases needing mechanical ventilation, and 25 000 deaths. But the response relayed from the Welsh government was that declaring an emergency “would not be helpful,” Sandifer said.
A mass testing centre was set up without Welsh leaders’ knowledge
Tracey Cooper, PHW chief executive, said a mass testing centre was set up in April 2020 in Cardiff City Stadium without PHW or Welsh government knowledge. Deloitte, a private firm, had been asked to set it up by the UK government.
“Unfortunately, neither PHW nor the Welsh government knew about that. I don’t know who made the decision,” she said. Over “four or five days” PHW went from being unaware of the site’s existence to staffing and running it, she explained. “The reason being it was there and we couldn’t not use it—but it hadn’t been planned.”
Public health officials had not prepared for a lengthy pandemic
Cooper told the inquiry that she had first had a “sobering” conversation with chief medical officer for Wales, Frank Atherton, in February 2020 about the scale of what was coming after seeing scenes from hospitals in Italy.
Initial plans had been for a 13 week epidemic, she explained. “Of course, by the time cases started rising again in the middle of the year, that was the tipping point,” she said. “Towards the end of August we saw rates really kicking up again. Then it was clear this was going to be a rolling pandemic.”
There were tensions between UK and Welsh governments
More than one witness described tensions because of different approaches taken by the UK and Welsh governments that were becoming more obvious from May 2020 onwards.
Jane Runeckles, a senior adviser to Drakeford, said relationships with her counterparts in the UK government deteriorated over time. “The fact that the Welsh government was taking decisions in a different way to the UK government just meant that there was very little to talk about,” she said. Runeckles also said they were given very little notice of Cobra meetings.
The first minister had a “genuine, sincerely held concern” that the actions of the UK government in the early pandemic amounted to a “genuine threat to the future of the UK,” she said.
Different rules on masks and lockdowns caused “confusion”
Former Welsh secretary Simon Hart told the inquiry that covid rules should have been the same across the UK. He believes that a move in Wales from May 2020 to put in place its own covid rules led to “confusion.”
“This was always going to be very complex, very contentious, and trigger all sorts of political and practical rows,” he said.
Hart noted that members of Drakeford’s cabinet were “expressing a surprising amount of confusion” about what they could and couldn’t do. “Mark’s own team were messaging each other saying ‘I don’t actually fully understand the rules, can anybody tell me?’” he said.
The hearing also heard that Drakeford had described local lockdowns in council areas put in place from September 2020 as a “failed experiment.”
The inquiry was shown a notebook in which Welsh chief medical officer Atherton had written the word “omnishambles,” which he said reflected his frustration with information coming from the UK level on different restrictions. But he said that Wales should have copied England when it made face coverings mandatory in public places because different rules were “problematic.”
People were discharged into care homes without testing
Nearly a fifth (17%) of all covid deaths registered in Wales have occurred in care homes.
The older people’s commissioner for Wales, Helena Herklots, said many people were discharged into care homes from hospital without testing, while people in care homes were also not being tested.
Goodall noted that, with hindsight, the discharge of vulnerable hospital patients into care homes “could’ve been targeted differently.” The focus had been on creating capacity in hospitals as well as trying to find the safest environment for people in the system.
Cooper explained PHW changed its policy on testing in light of new evidence on asymptomatic transmission. “The testing world was in a different space,” she said. “If someone had a negative test, it didn’t mean they weren’t incubating covid. The world changed significantly as we went into April and May.”
WhatsApp messages disappeared
A running theme through the inquiry so far in Wales has been claims that Welsh government senior special advisers “suspiciously and systematically” deleted communications. Runeckles was among those who had switched on the auto delete function to erase WhatsApp messages after seven days.
Deleting messages appeared to be the default approach—a matter that has already come up in the Westminster hearings. Former Welsh health minister Vaughan Gething is among those who turned on the disappearing messages function, the inquiry heard.
Government underestimated the amount and quality of PPE
In a witness statement to the inquiry, Gething admitted that the Welsh government had “underestimated how quickly the personal protestive equipment stockpile would be used up” and that a “small amount of its stockpile was not fit for purpose.”