Britain will face a “prolonged period” of excess deaths due to the pandemic - but not from the virus itself, the chief medical officer for England has warned.
The government's top advisors, Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, have said that the nation faces high death rates because people stayed away from the NHS during the pandemic - or could not get treatment.
With the knock-on effects of dealing with Covid-19, they have warned that Britain faces a rising death toll from heart disease and cancer cases as thousands saw routine treatments and appointments delayed.
Yesterday (December 1) the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England and the Chief Scientific Adviser made the comments in a co-authored technical report on the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK.
The report - published on Thursday by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) - was written for the future CMOs, National Medical Directors and public health leaders facing new pandemics on how to deal with similarly disruptive viral threats, it said.
Whitty and Vallance became the public faces of the Westminster government’s scientific response to Covid and appeared next to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson during tense Downing Street briefings as they talked the nation through the crisis.
Across eleven chapters, the authors cover topics such as care homes, contract tracing, testing and lockdowns - including warning that the speed at which Covid vaccines were developed might lull politicians into a false sense of security.
Britain had to rely on lockdowns, face masks, ventilation and hand washing before drugs were available and immunity levels rose.
The ministers said in the report that testing shortages in the “critical months” at the start of the pandemic hampered efforts to track the virus, warning that “this may well be a repeated problem in future pandemics”.
In another stark warning, they said that hundreds more Britons than expected are currently dying each week, despite the worst of the pandemic being over.
The experts say the collateral effects of Covid on treating cancer are to blame for a big proportion of those, since checks ground to a halt during the pandemic.
During this time, there were “limits” to how far telephone and video GP appointments could replace face-to-face appointments, the report said, but added “in many cases the balance of risks and benefits still favoured remote support”.
Discussing measures put in place to respond to the surge in Covid patients, it said: “Shifting to remote consultations, discouraging unnecessary health setting presentations and asking that those with specific symptoms avoid healthcare settings unless necessary has been an effective way to reduce potential transmission risks and additional burden during a time of significant pressure.
“However, this must be balanced with a risk that health-seeking behaviours were adjusted to such a degree that there was significant unmet need, with resulting impacts on mortality and morbidity.”
The shift to online GP appointments helped to reduce transmission but a reluctance could lead to further deaths and illness, with the report adding: "There is little doubt that delays in presentation, reductions in secondary prevention (such as statins and antihypertensives), postponement of elective and semi-elective care and screening will have led to later and more severe presentation of non-Covid illness.
"The combined effect of this will likely lead to a prolonged period of non-Covid excess mortality and morbidity after the worst period of the pandemic is over."
Meanwhile, the report outlined that dealing with care homes involved “some of the most complex” decisions.
The officials said that the controversial decision to discharge potential Covid positive residents into care homes during the pandemic played a role in the deaths of thousands of elderly Britons.
Officials tried to reduce transmission of the virus without producing staff shortages in care and leaving vulnerable residents isolated.
But despite criticism of the policy, Whitty and Vallance have insisted this “does not appear to have been the dominant way in which Covid-19 entered most care homes”.
The comprehensive run-through also touched on the on the tensions with politicians during the pandemic, which described a "craving for certainty" when scientists were still grappling with the at-the-time unknown virus.
They wrote: "Policymakers are often comforted by being able to see a line on a graph purporting to show what will happen under a given policy, but modelling will never be able to precisely predict the future."
And they went on to add: "Delays in drugs or vaccines being available, or the emergence of a variant with greater transmissibility, vaccine escape or leading to more severe disease, could result in longer deployment of non-pharmaceutical intervention."
But they did go on to stress to their successors the importance of testing new drugs and policies, despite the urge and “very strong” temptation to take swift action with untested techniques.
On the same hand, they did go on to praise the “extraordinary speed” of Covid vaccine development, but warned to their successors that: “There is a danger this falsely reassures some policymakers that a vaccine can be produced at this speed for the next pandemic.”
The pair acknowledge the downsides of lockdowns and school closures, saying they were always a matter of the "least bad option".
Weighing up the risks of school closures was “particularly difficult and contentious”, but added they have the ”potential to have lasting effects on children’s education, developmental and life chances”.
In one example, they cited that psychological distress increased from 19 per cent of people in 2019 to 30 per cent, driven by a lack of enjoyable daily activities.
Among children, mental health referrals increased by 81 per cent in the period April to September 2021, compared to the same period in 2019.
The findings are likely to be slammed on by critics of lockdown, but Whitty and Vallance stressed that letting the disease spread would also have “major significant harmful effects” on wider health conditions as well as society and the economy.
They added: “If the public had not responded so altruistically the outcomes would have been significantly worse."
The report comes after the start of the UK Covid-19 inquiry - chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett - which will begin public hearings next year examining the Government response to the pandemic.
