The UK COVID-19 Inquiry has released its first module report exploring how resilient and prepared the UK was for the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Following months of evidence collection, including testimony from 68 factual and expert witnesses including LSHTM academics, the Inquiry has outlined its key recommendations relating to how the UK deals with “whole system civil emergencies” like a pandemic. 

The report calls for a “major overhaul” of systems and processes behind the UK’s ability to deal with pandemics which it said “suffered from several significant flaws” in the pre-2020 period.

Among several recommendations, the module report calls for “better systems of data collection and sharing in advance of future pandemics” and for the UK government to “establish new mechanisms for the timely collection, analysis, secure sharing and use of reliable data for informing emergency responses”.

Commenting on the findings, including the need for better data sharing and collection, Centre Co-Director Professor Adam Kucharski said: 

“COVID-19 demonstrated the amount of damage a pandemic can do, particularly if countries aren’t adequately prepared. When you look at other countries’ responses, it wasn't just about the decisions they made in the middle of the outbreak. A key factor which affected this was the data infrastructure, resources, protocols, policies they had before that, which in some cases put them in a much better position than the UK.

“It's clear that the UK can not only learn about its own handling of the pandemic through the scrutiny of the COVID-19 Inquiry, but this is also an opportunity to learn from other countries to improve for the future. 

“For instance, training and resourcing public health teams in procedures required for effective testing, contract tracing and isolation ahead of a pandemic was advantageous for many countries. Thanks to their previous experience battling SARS and MERS outbreaks, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong were better prepared for an outbreak of a severe infection like COVID-19 than the UK. Similarly, Taiwan and South Korea’s digital approach to contact tracing systems allowed the linking of travel data, contacts and cases, as well as movements linking people to outbreak venues – helping curb COVID-19’s spread quickly within the countries, without the need for as many disruptive blanket control measures.” 

Professor Kucharski, who provided expertise to multiple governments during the pandemic, both in the UK and elsewhere, is now working on the Epiverse-TRACE initiative, which is a range of software tools to strengthen and modernise collaborative data analysis platforms ahead of the next pandemic. The hope is that these tools could be easily used from the very beginning of a future disease outbreak, helping public health officials globally to understand new threats faster and put evidence-informed health measures into place more rapidly.

Professor Liam Smeeth, LSHTM’s Director, also highlighted the importance of learning from other countries when facing the danger of the next pandemic. He said: "It’s not too late. We have a golden opportunity to learn lessons from how other countries responded to COVID-19 and enhance our global health security.”

Find out more about how the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response at LSHTM is helping to redefine preparedness for the pandemic era by taking concrete action through its research work.

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