The NHS could have prevented “chaos and panic” had the system not been left wholly unprepared for the pandemic, the editor of a British medical journal has said. Numerous warnings were issued but these were not heeded, Richard Horton wrote in the Lancet. “It failed, in part, because ministers didn’t follow WHO’s advice to ‘test, test, test’ every suspected case. “This plan, agreed far too late in the course of the outbreak, has left the NHS wholly unprepared for the surge of severely and critically ill patients that will soon come,” he wrote. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “The UK’s science-led action plan is led by global experts in the principles of infectious disease control.

Source: The Guardian March 28, 2020 07:46 UTC