Health and Sport Committee Tuesday 28 April 2020 Session 5 © Parliamentary copyright. Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body Information on the Scottish Parliament’s copyright policy can be found on the website - www.parliament.scot or by contacting Public Information on 0131 348 5000 Tuesday 28 April 2020 CONTENTS Col. COVID-19 .......................................................................................................................................................... 1 HEALTH AND SPORT COMMITTEE 9th Meeting 2020, Session 5 CONVENER *Lewis Macdonald (North East Scotland) (Lab) DEPUTY CONVENER *Emma Harper (South Scotland) (SNP) COMMITTEE MEMBERS *George Adam (Paisley) (SNP) *Miles Briggs (Lothian) (Con) *Alex Cole-Hamilton (Edinburgh Western) (LD) *David Stewart (Highlands and Islands) (Lab) *David Torrance (Kirkcaldy) (SNP) *Sandra White (Glasgow Kelvin) (SNP) *Brian Whittle (South Scotland) (Con) *attended THE FOLLOWING ALSO PARTICIPATED: Professor Hugh Pennington (University of Aberdeen) CLERK TO THE COMMITTEE David Cullum LOCATION The Adam Smith Room (CR5) 1 28 APRIL 2020 2 I welcome to the committee Professor Hugh Scottish Parliament Pennington, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the University of Aberdeen. Health and Sport Committee Professor Pennington, thank you for joining us. Unusually, the committee will, because of the Tuesday 28 April 2020 challenges of managing a virtual meeting such as this, take questions in a prearranged order. I will [The Convener opened the meeting at 10:00] start with the first question, and then ask each member in turn to ask questions. I will invite Covid-19 Professor Pennington to respond to each member. Once a member’s questions have been answered, The Convener (Lewis Macdonald): Good I will invite the next questioner, and so on until the morning and welcome to the ninth meeting of the evidence session is concluded. Health and Sport Committee in 2020. I thank all It is always helpful in circumstances such as members for their attendance today, including these to keep questions and answers succinct colleagues who are joining the meeting from and, once someone is called, to give broadcasting remote locations around Scotland. I thank our staff a few seconds to make the speaker’s parliamentary staff, in particular the broadcasting microphone operate before they begin to ask a office, for all their hard work in setting up this first question or provide an answer. remote formal meeting of the committee. I will start. Considering the bigger picture around The committee recognises the very challenging Covid-19 in Scotland, what more—if anything—do times in which we live. We pay tribute to all the you believe could have been done in advance to organisations in the health and social care sector, prepare the national health service, the social care and to local essential services, for their continuing system and the country as a whole for tackling dedicated service and hard work at this time. We such a pandemic? do not want to place any undue pressure on those bodies during this public health emergency, but we Professor Hugh Pennington (University of have agreed that it is, as the First Minister has Aberdeen): We have had a pandemic plan in said, important that parliamentary scrutiny and the place for many years, but it was directed against accountability of the Scottish Government influenza. Of course there are similarities, but continue. there are also big differences between Covid-19 and influenza. The differences between the two This date is marked every year as international viruses must be borne in mind when we talk about workers memorial day, in honour of those who the things that were done well, the things that have lost their lives in the course of their should have been done but were not done, and employment. This year, the Royal College of the things that were not done as well as they might Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives and other have been done. trade unions have called for a minute’s silence across the United Kingdom to honour all the I declare an interest in that I am coming at this workers who have lost their lives to coronavirus as a virologist who started his career, many years while seeking to deliver healthcare and essential ago, at St Thomas’ hospital, which we have all services on behalf of us all. The committee will heard of because the Prime Minister was a patient observe that minute of silence at 11 o’clock. there. At the hospital, I worked with June Almeida, the electron microscopist. June, who was born in I ask all meeting participants to ensure that their Glasgow, discovered human coronavirus in the mobile phones are in silent mode. 1960s. That was a long time ago, but I have a little The first item on our agenda is an evidence bit of experience of the matter. session on Covid-19 and pandemics in general. What have we done well? Once we have The committee has agreed to focus its attention decided to do something—for example, the initially on four aspects of Covid-19: personal lockdown—it has been successful. However, what protective equipment, testing, our resilience we missed was that we did not put enough emergency planning and preparation, and the emphasis on testing. I declare an interest as a impact on care homes. microbiologist, who used to run a laboratory In order to address those issues, we will start whose main function was testing. Clearly, the meeting with a wider evidence session. We therefore, I put it high on my list of matters to think have in mind, of course, what will happen as about. restrictions are eased, as well as what immediate Testing is one of the big differences between lessons are already apparent and what lessons dealing with Covid-19 and dealing with influenza. might become apparent, should restrictions In an influenza pandemic, we do little testing; we subsequently require to be tightened in any way. test to find out what the virus is, but most patients 3 28 APRIL 2020 4 never get tested. The test is usually quite people on whom we could rely to run a sound and laborious and it takes a long time to get a result. safe test. I am sure that, if they had been asked, For influenza, antiviral drugs are available, so we they would have put up their hands and said, “I’ll treat people on spec, because the drugs are pretty do it by the middle of yesterday”, because this is a safe to give. national crisis. For influenza, we also set in motion the My main criticism is in respect of conscription of development of a vaccine, although that usually all available facilities. Facilities are still being happens a bit later than the peak of the pandemic. conscripted; my understanding is that, still, not all A vaccine means that we can cope with the are being used in-house. There has been a delay aftermath of the pandemic and stop the virus in people getting their act together on conscription. going on the rampage again—although we are not I do not mean that force should have been used, usually successful in doing that. but I do not know why there were not, for example, adverts in the newspapers. It does not matter how We do not have either a vaccine or antiviral conscription could have been done—it could have drugs available for Covid-19, so prevention is been done, and it could have been done much paramount, and testing is the only way to know faster and more effectively. where the virus is. The mantra that has been uttered at the number We have had a good test available since 13 10 press conferences is that a bad test is worse January. Following the events in Wuhan, the than no test at all. That does not apply to the RT- Chinese did a genome sequence of the virus. That PCR test: it is a very good and sound test, and it gave us information on which one could design a gives a result within 24 hours. reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction— RT-PCR—test. Such tests have been around for a The Convener: In March, the strategy appeared number of years, and many laboratories use the to include testing and contact tracing. On 2 April, technique. the chief medical officer announced that contact tracing would no longer be used, because the My main criticism of the United Kingdom-wide strategy had moved from the contain phase to the response is not that we did not develop a test: we delay phase. Was that a strategic error? In the did. Public Health England developed a test circumstances that applied on 2 April, would it probably within 48 hours of the information being have been possible to continue to test and trace? made available on the World Health Organization Is there a way to address that issue, as we go influenza information exchange website. forward? Everybody had the necessary information to develop a test, which is a pretty straightforward Professor Pennington: In my opinion, it was a exercise if the technology is available, as Public policy error to move away from contact tracing. I Health England has at its Colindale lab, with which might come back to this later: we want to get virus I am very familiar. levels down to the point of elimination. We could have done a lot more to get the Public We can look at what is happening in New Health England test rolling in many of our centres. Zealand, which had far fewer cases to start with. There was a problem in having a degree of New Zealand takes a draconian approach to centralisation to the test, which meant that we did stopping the importation of viruses.