The Public Health Response to COVID-19 in the UK: A View from the Frontline

Abstract

AbstractThe author charts the experience of working on the frontline public health response during the pandemic. The UK’s initial public health response to the pandemic comprised a delayed lockdown, shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), insufficient testing capacity, and ambivalence about mask wearing. The pandemic’s first wave ravaged the health and care sectors. Subsequently, with experience and tight testing regimes, management of COVID-19 in the care sector was improved enormously. Hospitals reduced their workload to a bare minimum initially, followed by designing separate pathways to facilitate elective work, underpinned by testing and infection control. In addition to the elderly and frail, those on the fringes of society—for example, homeless, refugees, asylum seekers, and prison populations experienced high rates of infection and mortality. Nation-wide restrictions on movement were propped by an economic support program. The new school year in 2020 began amid rising cases, as people struggled to interpret confusing policies. Workplaces did not emerge from remote working till mid-2021 and remain a hub of infection transmission. The tussle between maintaining economic activity and education versus preventing the spread of cases continues, while the focus of the public health response moves to high vaccination coverage, rapid testing, and responding robustly to emerging variants of concern.