Recommendation 4

The failure to plan for the expansion of the detection and containment capabilities may have been the result of an undue focus on an influenza pandemic, rather than diseases with a longer incubation period. It is also, we believe, because the Government continued to doubt that a novel disease could circulate so widely in the UK, despite the 2017 National Risk Register judging it ‘likely’ that an emerging infectious disease would affect the UK in the next five years, and the 2018 Biological Security Strategy identifying multiple drivers that would have made an outbreak more—not less—likely.