Swine flu is spreading across the UK. Cases are now estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. The NHS helpline has received more than 50,000 calls in the last week alone. Seventeen people have died. Slowly, everyone seems to be waking up to the fact that pandemic flu is something we should all be concerned about. But does this mean that the government has lost its grip on the situation? No.
In terms of pandemic flu planning, and more importantly response, the situation is no worse than it was this time last week. It is no worse than it was on 2 July, when the UK officially moved from the "containment" phase to the "treatment" phase, and no worse than on 11 June when the World Health Organisation declared a move to planning phase six, the highest, indicating a full-blown global pandemic.
What we are (still) seeing is a disease whose arrival was predicted and has been planned for, a disease that is following a course that those who have bothered to read and digest preparedness plans for it will have expected. Understanding how the disease was likely to unfold (and has unfolded) helps to put all new developments, including the tragic deaths of a tiny number of people with no other immediately apparent health conditions, into perspective. The problem, of course, is that not everyone who should have read and digested the numerous plans and procedures for dealing with a flu pandemic has done so.
Companies should have written their pandemic flu contingency plans years ago – or at the very least when the disease appeared at the top of the first public version of the National Risk Register last year. Every business continuity manager and emergency planner in the country should already know how their company might function should large numbers of staff go ill. In doing this, they should have long ago highlighted the risk to their employees, helping individuals to think about what steps they might need to take to help themselves, such as planning for who will look after their children if schools close, or how easily they can work from home if the trains are not running because transport staff are ill. If organisations have been derelict in their duty the fault is theirs, not the government's. No pandemic plan has ever promised to prevent the spread of the disease. To do so would have been impossible.
The problem, of course, is that too many people have neither read the plans nor even know where they are (since you ask, on the labyrinthine Directgov site) because the government still has a long way to go in effectively communicating resilience and preparedness messages to its citizens, be those messages about pandemic flu, flooding or any of the other myriad threats and hazards on the National Risk Register. If the government deserves criticism at all, this is where it should be directed, not at the way it is handling the current pandemic.
