April 19, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The Times On the third Friday of January
a silent and stealthy killer was creeping across the
world. Passing from person to person and borne on
ships and planes, the coronavirus was already
leaving a trail of bodies.
The virus had spread from
China to six countries and was almost certainly in many
others. Sensing the coming danger, the British
government briefly went into wartime mode that day,
holding a meeting of Cobra, its national crisis
committee.
But it took just an hour
that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus
threat. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, bounced out
of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily
told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.
This was despite the
publication that day of an alarming study by Chinese
doctors in the medical journal, The Lancet. It assessed
the lethal potential of the virus, for the first time
suggesting it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu
pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people.
