'Who do we not save?': Dominic Cummings reveals scribbled pandemic Plan B 'from inside No 10'
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Dominic Cummings has tweeted an intriguing picture of the Government's pandemic planning, showing that officials and ministers asked themselves: “Who do we not save?” as they confronted the first wave of Covid.
Before meeting a committee of MPs this morning, Mr Cummings posted a picture of a whiteboard apparently showing the “first sketch” of a plan to send the country into lockdown and “avoid NHS collapse”. "Details later," he added.
According to Mr Cummings, the plan was scribbled on the whiteboard in the Prime Minister’s Downing Street study on Friday March 13, ten days before the country went into full lockdown. It was shown to Mr Johnson the next day, Mr Cummings says.
“First sketch of Plan B, PM study, Fri 13/3 eve - shown PM Sat 14/4: NB. Plan A 'our plan' breaks NHS,>4k p/day dead min. Plan B: lockdown, suppress, crash programs (tests/treatments/vaccines etc), escape 1st AND 2nd wave (squiggly line instead of 1 or 2 peaks)... details later,” he wrote.
Lettering at the top right of the board shows who else was involved - including the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, the Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, and Mark Sweeney, Director General of the Cabinet Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, as well as “Dom” himself.
The picture reveals that officials and ministers had come to the realisation that Plan A - to try and mitigate rather than suppress the spread of Covid - would likely end in disaster.
“Our current ‘plan’ means 4,000 people per day dying at peak,” the whiteboard says.
The six-step plan B begins with the assumption that there will be no vaccine in 2020. As it happened, that was a pessimistic assumption as Margaret Keenan became the first person to receive the jab in December 8.
The second step warns that the government “must avoid NHS collapse”. If the collapse is “non-linear”, the officials warned, and the NHS suddenly became overwhelmed with patients, then the death rate could be expected to rise from 1pc to 2pc.
The third assumption was simple. “To stop the NHS collapse, we will probably have to ‘lockdown’.”
In the fourth step, Mr Cummings and his fellow officials began to sketch out what the unprecedented lockdown might look like.
“Everyone stays at home (except critical infrastructure people). Pubs etc close.”
The officials then asked themselves how millions of older and vulnerable people would cope. “Who looks after the people who can’t survive alone?”
Social distancing rules were sketched out under the headings: “less contact, no contact, contact illegal”, while the plan noted a need for “crash programs, ventilators, testing”.
Point 5 begins to make the case for an aggressive lockdown compared to the mitigation strategy.
“What’s different between Plan A and B? Aggressive next week. Full lockdown before collapse. Which means 2 weeks before we catch up with Italy.”
According to a scribbled graph, doing nothing would lead to a vast first wave, far above a line marked “NHS broken”.
A second line marked “our plan” would lead to a shallower and longer wave, but still rising above NHS capacity.
A third line marked Plan B shows a series of smaller waves, each below the “NHS broken” line.
The scribbled plan also reveals the first mention of an NHS app, with a suggestion that it might include employee status, vulnerability and location, as well as “local NHS status”.
Mr Cummings on Tuesday added to his lengthy series of posts on Twitter previewing arguments and claims he will likely lay out before MPs.
In one tweet Mr Cummings claimed "one of the worst failings" in the Government response to the emerging pandemic in spring 2020 was "the almost total absence of a serious plan for shielding/social care".
Mr Cumming added: "In general, there was widespread delusion we HAD a great plan. It turned out to barely exist."
