Top advisers to the Scottish Government 'froze' in the face of pandemic, inquiry hears

 Chief Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood ignored warnings of catastrophe, says professor

Scotland’s chief medical officer did not take the risk of Covid seriously enough despite warnings of an ‘unfolding catastrophe’, an inquiry has heard.

Dr Catherine Calderwood, who was later forced to step down after breaking coronavirus rules, ‘froze’ in the face of the oncoming pandemic and wasted valuable time, it was claimed.

Witness Professor Mark Woolhouse yesterday launched a savage attack on the Scottish Government’s medical officials in the lead-up to the global outbreak.

The professor of infectious disease ­epidemiology told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry in Edinburgh he had warned Dr Calderwood of the rapidly approaching virus in January 2020 as it had started spreading from human to human in Wuhan, China.

Dr Catherine Calderwood was forced to step down after breaking coronavirus rules

But the Edinburgh University professor said Dr Calderwood replied to tell him officials were only ‘actively considering the details of the pandemic’.

He told lead counsel to the inquiry Jamie Dawson, KC: ‘I don’t regard “actively ­considering” as sufficient.’

The email he sent to Dr Calderwood on January 21 warned it would ‘become a pandemic’ which would be similar to swine flu and would become a ‘widespread epidemic fuelled by mild cases but with mortality among vulnerable patients’.

On January 25, he warned that within a year ‘at least half the population will become infected’, the mortality rate would triple and the health ­system would be ‘overwhelmed’.

Professor Woolhouse said the situation was not being treated ‘with the seriousness or the urgency that I felt it needed’.

Desperate to be heard, he turned to the UK’s chief ­medical officer Dame Sally ­Davies for help, who then emailed Dr ­Calderwood on February 5.

The witness said he had ­contacted Dame Sally because of his frustration with a ‘lack of action’, and he summed up the email to the senior medic: ‘I’m saying, “Sally, can you get ­Catherine to listen to me because she’s not listening”.’

Professor Mark Woolhouse attacked the Scottish Government’s medical officials in the lead up to the global outbreak

On apparent inaction by the Scottish Government’s scientific establishment, he said: ‘What you get is an unfolding catastrophe. Add this number, and this number, and this number, and this number, I could get a catastrophe.

‘I think they couldn’t take that final step and put all this ­information together.’

Mr Dawson asked: ‘Are you suggesting that, given the number that came up, they rather froze?’ The witness responded: ‘Yes.’

Professor Woolhouse said politicians were ‘mistaken or misinformed’ about the virus and the public was ‘misled’.

He said the virus ‘transmits very poorly’ outdoors, ‘so there was pretty much zero ­public health benefit keeping us indoors. That wasn’t required at all. We never needed to do that.

‘Another good example – that was an absolute outcry in the summer of 2020 – was that ­people were going to beaches. There was never an outbreak of Covid anywhere in the world linked to a beach. It was fine.’

He said schools contributed ‘a little’ to the spread of the virus, but ‘so little that there was essentially no danger’ that schools would take the UK past the ‘tipping point’.

Professor Woolhouse said the UK Government ‘should have realised much, much more quickly based on the evidence from around the world’ and could have taken a similar approach to Denmark, which reopened schools in May 2020.

The inquiry before Baroness Hallett continues.