To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, what steps he plans to take to help ensure that lessons are learnt from the handling of the covid-19 pandemic before the public inquiry into its handling, for the purposes of ensuring a stronger response in the event that the virus mutates in a dangerous way between autumn 2021 and spring 2022.
Answered on
18 October 2021
The Government has consistently adapted its response to COVID-19, including new variants, as more is learnt about the virus and how best to manage it.
The Government has developed a wide range of tools to: reduce the risk of new variants emerging; stop and slow importation of the most dangerous variants; identify new variants and outbreaks; and ensure there is an appropriate response if further outbreaks occur. This includes - but is not limited to - the enhancement of domestic sequencing capacity this year. Our domestic capacity is set to further increase over the coming months, enabling a higher number of PCR positive cases to undergo whole genome sequencing, which in turn improves our ability to detect any new variants.
The Government is committed to learning lessons from COVID-19 to inform our preparedness for future epidemics. The government fully expects that many of those lessons will come from the public inquiry which will begin its work in spring 2022.