A busload of tourists from Wuhan who visited Co Antrim and then travelled to Dublin in January 2020 “very clearly dispelled” the idea the Covid-19 pandemic presented no threat, a public inquiry has heard.
The UK-wide inquiry into the pandemic, which has been hearing evidence in Belfast since last week, was told on Tuesday that a public health official was dispatched to provide advice and check the group’s health, and the first and deputy first minister were briefed by the Minister for Health.
Richard Pengelly, who was the permanent secretary at the Department of Health in Northern Ireland during the pandemic, was answering questions about Northern Ireland’s preparedness for the pandemic and whether officials believed it could be contained.
The visit was revealed in an internal civil service message, shown to the inquiry, which was sent on January 25th, 2020, a month before the first case of Covid-19 was identified in Northern Ireland.
“A group of Chinese tourists from Wuhan have arrived in Larne by bus from Scotland,” the message said. “They are staying overnight in Larne, touring today and heading to Dublin this evening.”
“DOH [Department of Health] are deploying someone from the PHA [Public Health Agency] to provide advice to the group and to check their health. CMO [Chief Medical Officer] is not concerned.”
Mr Pengelly said the group had proven asymptomatic and there was “no further intervention that could happen at that stage”, and the visitors travelled to Dublin the next morning.
Lead counsel for the inquiry, Clair Dobbin KC, put it to Mr Pengelly that “any idea that this pandemic was something happening on the other side of the world and presented no threat to Northern Ireland was very clearly dispelled at this point in time.”
“Yes,” Mr Pengelly replied.
The inquiry chairwoman, Baroness Hallett, asked Mr Pengelly: “When people in your position and many others around you and in the rest of the UK were told that the two scenarios were ‘China contains’ or ‘global pandemic’, didn’t anybody stop and say, ‘well, wait a minute, we know visitors from Wuhan, the centre of where the disease started, have been visiting ... Northern Ireland’?
“Doesn’t that indicate that back in January people should have been questioning whether China could ever contain it because their people were travelling the world?”
Mr Pengelly said this was a “very fair point” and “my understanding was that was why the assessment was that the second of the two scenarios was seen as the most likely situation, that it wouldn’t be contained within China.”
Baroness Hallett said her point was that this realisation “should have come earlier than February, that should have come in January”.
“I think in January we were starting to plan on that basis,” Mr Pengelly said.
Mr Pengelly also said Northern Ireland “entered the pandemic with a very tired workforce” and with a “configuration of services that wasn’t as good as it could have been” and the problems in the Northern health service were exacerbated by the lack of an Executive from 2017 to 2020.
“I think had an Executive been in place for three years, it wouldn’t have been perfect, but it would have been better than it was at the point we entered the pandemic,” he said.
Also giving evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry on Tuesday, the North’s chief scientific adviser, Prof Ian Young, said there was a “gap” in Northern Ireland’s Covid-19 response in the early stages of the pandemic as his role was vacant until he returned from leave on March 23rd.
This meant, Ms Dobbin said, that “it wasn’t until you came back that a number of important parts of the response were instituted; for example, it was only when you came back, and I think you drove this, that there was any modelling capacity in Northern Ireland.”
Prof Young said “people were just under so much pressure, with so much to do, that it was impossible to address absolutely everything”.
Ms Dobbin also asked Prof Young why it “wasn’t ultimately possible” for the two jurisdictions on the island to have joint modelling during the pandemic.
Prof Young said he had “quite extensive conversations and discussions with modelling colleagues in the Republic of Ireland to explore options, we certainly shared data, and I think there were occasions when we used our models on the Republic of Ireland and occasions when they looked at our data with their models.
“But to combine the data, given the differences in it, would not have been meaningful or helpful, indeed it might have been misleading to one or both of us.”
He said his view was that “the pandemic proceeded in a broadly similar way across the island of Ireland ... but more work needs to be done there to understand that and to provide unequivocal evidence”.
On Tuesday, Sinn Féin said the Minister for the Economy, Conor Murphy – who was minister for finance during the Covid-19 pandemic – would not appear before the inquiry on Wednesday as scheduled, for medical reasons.
In a statement, the party’s vice-president, First Minister Michelle O’Neill, said Mr Murphy had been “advised to rest pending medical tests”.
He was not present in the Assembly to respond to a motion on the economy on Tuesday.
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