Britain's public health officials failed to draw up plans for mass community testing, despite warnings about coronavirus from the World Health Organisation.
Such measures were never even discussed as emergency planners wrongly believed a new strain of flu, rather than Covid-19, would be the next health issue in the UK, a senior government adviser has claimed.
WHO had warned ministers, as well as Public Health, Cabinet and Department of Health officials that community testing could slow the spread of the virus. “That may have been a mistake,” Professor Graham Medley, chairman of SPI-M, official government advisers for infectious diseases, told The Telegraph.