Government documents show no planning for ventilators in the event of a pandemic

After failing to prepare, the UK now faces a grave shortage of the machines that will keep critical patients alive.

Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock (R) and Britain's Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty (L), leave from 10 Downing Street in central London on March 2, 2020, following an emergency COBRA meeting into UK's developing coronavirus COVID-19 situation. - Britain's Prime Minister Prime Minister on Monday chaired an emergency COBRA meeting on the coronavirus outbreak, after the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom rose to 36. (Photo by Tolga AKMEN / AFP) (Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)

In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise, codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, but the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016.

“We’ve just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people,” she told the World Innovation Summit for Health at the time. “It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies,” Davies said. One conclusion was that Britain, as Davies put it, faced the threat of “inadequate ventilation” in a future pandemic. She was referring to the need for ventilation machines, which keep oxygen pumping in patients critically ill with a respiratory disease such as coronavirus.