MINISTERS were warned as many as 820,000 could die from Covid in January 2020 – but responded with a ‘shrug’, Matt Hancock claims.
The ex-Health Secretary defends his own response to the pandemic, while laying into care home bosses, ex-No10 aide Dominic Cummings and a string of others.
Mr Hancock claims that when he shared this information with the Cabinet, the reaction was ‘somewhat shrug shrug’
Sir Chris privately warned a meeting of officials up to 820,000 people in the UK could die in a ‘worst case scenario’
In extracts from his diaries, serialised in the Daily Mail, Mr Hancock says he was warned a ‘very large number of people will die’ from Covid more than two months before the Government put Britain in lockdown.
He claims Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty told him on January 17, 2020, that there was a ’50:50 chance’ the virus would escape China and cause mass death.
Just 11 days later Sir Chris privately warned a meeting of officials up to 820,000 people in the UK in a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’.
Recalling the moment, Mr Hancock writes: ‘‘The whole room froze. We are looking at a human catastrophe on a scale not seen here for a century.’
But Mr Hancock claims that when he shared this information with the Cabinet, the reaction was ‘somewhat shrug shrug’.
He accuses Dominic Cummings – who has been hugely critical of Mr Hancock’s own performance – of blocking early Covid preparations because he did not want to distract attention from Britain’s exit from the EU at the end of January 2020.
In comments that will prove hugely controversial, Mr Hancock blames the catastrophe in care homes on some of their own managers, who he accuses of ‘unscrupulously’ using workers infected with the virus.
He insists that despite ordering residents to be discharged from hospital into homes without being tested for Covid – which he says was insisted upon by the former NHS boss Sir Simon Stevens – this was not to blame for most of the deaths.
The diaries also reveal his frustration at one billion items of PPE being left stuck in a warehouse for weeks because it only had one access door, and how shocked ministers drew up secret succession plans in the event Boris Johnson died of Covid.
Mr Hancock is expected to come under heavy fire in the upcoming Public Inquiry, with his diaries being seen as attempt to get his defence in first.
