Recommendation 8

In April 2021, the Department identified the Delta form of COVID-19 as a variant of concern and within four weeks it had become dominant in the UK, accounting for 99% of positive cases.13 The Chief Executive of the UKHSA told us that even with the benefit of hindsight they could not identify anything NHST&T could have done to stop the spread of the new variant. They noted that while there had been isolated local successes in containing pockets of variants, such as in Sefton and Bolton, the transmissibility of the Delta variant made controlling it particularly difficult. They told us that there had been over 4,000 mutations of the virus and the combination of the sheer number of virus mutations and the time taken to understand whether a variant was of significance or concern, created difficulties in managing them effectively. This meant that, despite NHST&T’s significant and internationally well-regarded efforts to sequence the genomes of variants, the Delta form of COVID-19 was able to spread rapidly once it arrived in the UK.14