Unburdening Myself

Craig DalzellI’ve spent today reading the first of the UK Covid inquiry reports and I really can’t tell you how unburdened it makes me feel. A stain on my soul that I’ve carried for years may well be healing.As someone in the world of think (and do) tanks and in lobbying I don’t expect to have everything I say adopted before the ink is even dry on the page. That’s not how it works. Our greatest policy successes have been long, hard struggles and because much of the hardest work happens in the background, when the success does come folk can wonder why we felt we had to fight so hard because, in hindsight, how could it have gone any other way? It led me to coining the phrase that everything in politics seems impossible until the moment it becomes inevitable.And then there are the campaigns we haven’t yet won and the ones we outright lost. There are many of those too and while I obviously regret not seeing our vision come to pass, that’s part of politics too. One cannot have a democracy if everything that happens is due to the opinion of a single person.Covid hit differently though. I’ve carried the burden of my policy work throughout that period ever since. My failures there, as I saw them, felt much more real and hit much harder. Lives were at stake. And while I had absolute conviction in everything I said and did, I was almost crushed under the weight of my own Impostor Syndrome.Common Weal is not a medical think tank. I am not a medical doctor. My PhD is in laser physics and fibre optics. What do I know about epidemiology other than actually understanding exponential growth? We approached our comments on the pandemic with extreme trepidation precisely because we, and I, felt that we were not the people who should have been saying the thing. But as we looked around, no-one else was.And so I remember in early March discussing with colleagues about my concern that Scotland and the UK weren’t shutting our borders or testing enough people. I remember the grave conversation I had less than a week later about how we should consider working from home...and the day after that when the first Covid death in Scotland was announced and we decided to close our office.I remember my mounting worry during a shopping trip a few days after that where it was obvious that panic buying was setting in and the “advice” from government around masks and distancing just wasn’t being observed. I caught Covid on that shopping trip, with my symptoms setting in the day before the first UK lockdown. I couldn’t get tested – they were still only available to those who were admitted to hospital. Given how ill I ended up, I probably should have been one of them.We published our first Covid policy paper, Ending Lockdown, on the 9th of April 2020 in response to the Scottish Government declaring that Covid testing was “a distraction” (I hadn’t recovered from Covid at that point. Writing that paper left me bedridden for a week afterwards). The plan would have involved blanket testing and quarantining to curb the first lockdown and prevent a second. It was all but ignored. I was told there was no way they could do that many tests. I spoke to agricultural vets who said that they had been trying in vain to turn over their labs to the Scottish Government because they do that kind of volume testing all the time (unsurprisingly, herd animals are quite susceptible to infectious illness and testing is a tool for controlling that).I remember the media and Government being full of praise in late June and early July about how the lockdown had worked and Covid had been all but eliminated – but I was still watching the data with that mindset of actually understanding how exponential growth works. You can see a screenshot from my data below.By the first few days of July I made a (non-monetary) bet with Robin about when we’d go into lockdown again. I said the start of August (which turned out to be when Aberdeen was put into lockdown) and Robin ended up correctly predicting the week of the second all-Scotland lockdown shortly after (I had the numbers on my side, but he predicted the political response). I say this not to brag but to point out that hindsight was not a factor here. Within days of the return of the rising in cases in July, we were able – using only public data – to make a call that no-one in the Government was able to do for several weeks afterwards. Once again, my feeling of helplessness and despair throughout that summer cannot be understated.The low point for me came in September with the publication of my second paper “Warning Lights”. Remember at the time that Scotland was following a one nation approach to restrictions – even after the Aberdeen cluster – whereas countries that were successfully containing the spread of the virus were taking a much more localised approach. I adapted the plans of the best examples from around the world (places like South East Asia, New Zealand, Mexico etc) and put together a policy package of proactive and pre-emptive testing, localised travel restrictions, border controls and quarantines. Unlike the first paper, it wasn’t totally ignored by the media and was even mentioned in Parliament. However, the Government completely dismissed the paper essentially saying that everything they were doing was just fine.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6SpEDJg0TcIt wasn’t fine. And within weeks, the Scottish Government implemented its own system of local test reporting, a tiered lockdown system and we even eventually got the border controls and systematic quarantines. However, at every step of that process, the government watered down and cut corners. The results speak for themselves. I remember spending that Christmas in the house, opening presents over Zoom.As part of that paper I recommended that the Government revisit its pandemic (and general emergency) planning strategies. This came not just from a national standpoint but from a local one too. I spoke to people in front line public sector jobs who asked “where the disaster manual was?” only to be told there wasn’t one. If there’s a risk that you, as a teacher or leisure sector worker, could be commandeered into pandemic work such as setting up emergency classrooms, aid stations, vaccine centres or – worst case scenario – morgues, you should know where the instructions are that tell you what you need to do. This is basic wargaming strategy and it had very obviously been lacking.And this brings us back to this week’s Covid inquiry report that highlighted all of those failures of planning and preparation. The recommendations of the previous wargames hadn’t been implemented. The preparations were shown to be entirely inadequate. The planning was frankly wrong – the Government had outright planned for the wrong kind of pandemic.We said all of this at the time. It wasn’t hindsight that we look back on now. We now see that when we called for the borders to be closed we weren’t being ignored but outright disbelieved because you shouldn’t need to do that if this virus is just another kind of flu and we’ll have a vaccine and anti-viral package ready to go by next week.So I’m reading through this week’s report with a sense of catharsis. I’ve carried a lot of guilt for several years over feeling that I wasn’t doing enough to raise the alarm. It turns out that the Scottish Government heard us, but simply chose not to listen.As I say, I’m not coming out of this with a sense of “I told you so” as if I feel vindicated in hindsight. Instead, the lesson I want the Scottish Government to learn is that it shouldn’t take a former laser physicist turned policy-wonk to outguess them on public health policy. Instead of “I told you so” I want them to actually learn the lessons they should have learned before Covid, to prove that to us by promising to and then actually implementing the recommendations of the inquiry in full and without argument. I shouldn’t be the one to say the things I’ve said during the next inevitable (not impossible) pandemic. I’m not saying “I told you so”. I’m asking them to make it unnecessary for people like me to have to tell them again.