Matt Hancock ‘profoundly sorry’ for every death caused by Covid-19

Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UK Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. He also said: “The problem with the UK plan was that once we got to community transmission, it was wrongly assumed it wasn’t possible to stop the spread.” Mr Hancock argued that the country needed to be prepared to lockdown early in future to stop a virus spreading, adding that to accept it will just pass between people is “implicitly an assumption and a decision that those most vulnerable to it will be hardest hit”. He told the inquiry the “central failing” that hampered the UK’s response, common with the rest of the western world, “was the refusal and the explicit decision that it would not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic – that is wrong and that is at the centre of the failure of preparation.” The inquiry, chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett, also heard: – Medicines for intensive care were “within hours” of running out at the peak of the pandemic, Mr Hancock said. – Mr Hancock said there was “no such thing” as mass contact tracing systems as the pandemic took hold, while the lack of ability to test people in large numbers was “terrible”. In written evidence to the inquiry, Mr Hancock said: “There isn’t a day that goes by that I do not think about all those who lost their lives to this awful disease or the loved ones they have left behind…I express my deepest sympathies to all those affected.” Earlier, as Mr Hancock got out of a black Jaguar 4×4 outside the inquiry building in London, widow Lorelei King, 69, held up pictures of her husband, Vincent Marzello, who died from coronavirus aged 72 in a care home in March 2020.