COVID-19 in the UK and Occupational Health and Safety: a tale of predictable but not inevitable failures by Government when labor and nongovernmental organization offered better solutions
By Andrew Watterson
Global failures to protect the public from the corona virus first wave are visible for all to see. Global failures to protect the health and safety of doctors, nurses and other health professionals dealing with COVID-19 patients have been highly visible too on our TV screens and in newspapers. Workplace risks run by other workers also caught in the first wave often not been recognized so quickly or sometimes at all. Cleaners, porters, maintenance workers, public transport workers, taxi drivers, food industry and food shop staff, security guards, and public utility workers were all affected. Many vulnerable and precarious workers in gig economies across the world have lacked adequate health and safety measures and economic support during the pandemic.
Not all countries responded to the pandemic in the same way. Some controlled the virus very early and greatly reduce deaths and illnesses in the general population and hence greatly reduced the number of deaths of health care workers and ‘frontline’ and other workers. South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Germany, Denmark and Norway are particularly good albeit not perfect examples of this approach.
The UK has not been a COVID-19 success story. UK workers have been put at significant risk because of government failures in public health and occupational health and safety. Failures to plan for the pandemic, inspect workplaces, provide sufficient PPE for workers in health and social care settings, ensure rapid and extensive testing, tracking and isolating program were excused as not foreseeable. All four UK countries initially relied on flawed advice from Boris Johnson’s government that pandemic threat was not severe and did not merit urgent action. We were told the threats including the risks to workers could only have been identified with hindsight. This is not so. Generic planning for pandemics has been required for decades internationally. The UK should have had plans and procedures in place, including effective risk assessment and risk management strategies to protect workers, along with stockpiles of masks, gowns, visors and gloves from the early 2000s. It did not demonstrate its readiness in a series of national and global pandemic exercises. Planning should have covered health care workers, social care workers, frontline and essential workers and other workers: it did not. The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization produced pandemic health and safety guides and manuals to protect all workers during any pandemic several years and months prior to the COVID pandemic spread.
The UK simply failed to adopt such measures and act on early pandemic warnings in ways that several other countries did in Europe and Asia. Critically UK occupational health and safety agency resources and staff in both central and local authorities had been run down for decades along with National Health Service, key public health and environmental health capacity through cuts in public spending, deregulation and privatisation. The basic message that workers health was a public health matter was forgotten. Hence failures to protect health care workers jeopardized public health too. Simultaneously the UK Government was pre-occupied with leaving Europe (Brexit) when the pandemic started in China. The combined results proved catastrophic for worker health and safety and public health. Over 60,000 UK Covid-related deaths are estimated to have occurred by June 2020 including health, social care, transport and other workers. Black, Asian and Ethic Minority groups of workers have been particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. This happened despite numerous warnings from UK labor organizations and non-governmental organizations about the flawed policies in place prior to February and March 2020.
Adopting a precautionary principle approach to the pandemic was key. It did not happen. Protecting occupational health and public health services, planning properly and locking down earlier in the UK would not only have saved the lives of many workers and citizens but it would additionally have greatly reduced the economic damage of the pandemic. If labor and non-governmental organizations’ health and safety proposals had been taken up on PPE, testing and tracking, early lockdown, ending deregulation and ensuring proper inspections and workplace audits on pandemic planning and risk management, then the death and illness toll of COVID-19 could have been significantly reduced.
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