Politicians vow to learn Covid lessons after damning inquiry report finds 'citizens were failed'

Those across Stirling who lost their lives or lost a loved one to Covid-19 were “failed” by the UK and Scottish governments, according to a damning report into the country’s preparedness for the pandemic.The UK Covid Inquiry published its first in a series of reports and inquiry chairwoman Baroness Heather Hallett found that the national and devolved governments “failed their citizens” in their response.Stirling MSP, Evelyn Tweed, this week insisted that the Scottish Government is “committed to working together at all levels” to ensure that it learns from its mistakes.Meanwhile, Stirling’s newly elected MP, Chris Kane, said the new Labour government is “committed to learning the lessons from the inquiry” to protect citizens in the event of any future pandemics.Amongst its findings, the report also said that governments had used “jargon and euphemism to disguise...

tasks that had not been completed”.Baroness Hallett has called for critical reform of planning for public health emergencies and in her report she identified a “flawed approach to risk assessment”, failure to learn from past outbreaks of disease, and ministers not receiving a broad enough range of scientific advice and failing to challenge it, as contributing to the harms.The report said 235,000 deaths involving Covid had been recorded in the UK by the end of 2023 – including more than 17,000 in Scotland.In August 2022, we told how data from National Records of Scotland (NRS) showed that in Stirling, the rate of Covid deaths mentioned on the death certificate per head of population fell slightly below the national average.The Stirling age-standardised death rate sat at 103.4 per 100,000, compared to the Scottish figure of 111.59.