Health chiefs risked overplaying Covid fears at start of the pandemic, admits Sir Chris Whitty

HEALTH chiefs risked overplaying Covid fears at the start of the pandemic, Professor Sir Chris Whitty admitted yesterday.

The chief medical officer told the Covid-19 Inquiry he still worried about whether people were made overly frightened of the bug.

But he said Britain was facing catastrophe without action and the effect of the virus would have been “substantially worse” without the first lockdown.

But, on the other hand, he added that the scale of the second wave was probably under­appreciated by the public.

Sir Chris said: “I worried at the beginning and I still worry, did we get the level of concern right?

“Were we over-pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where, in fact, their actual risk was low?

“Some would say, if anything, we overdid it at the beginning.”

Another inquiry witness, NHS adviser Professor Kevin Fong, said: “The scale of death was astounding.

Prof Fong broke down in tears as he recalled the horror faced by intensive care staff during the early days of the crisis.

He had worked through the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 but said Covid was worse.

He said: “Sometimes nurses were so overwhelmed that they were putting patients in body bags, putting them on the floor, and putting another patient in that bed straight away because there wasn’t time.”