Others are more critical. A senior academic directly involved in Cygnus and the current pandemic said: “These exercises are supposed to prepare government for something like this - but it appears they were aware of the problem but didn’t do much about it.

“We’ve been quite surprised at the lack of coherent planning for a pandemic on this scale. It’s basically a lack of attention to what would be needed to prevent a disease like this from overwhelming the system. All the flexibility has been pared away so it’s difficult to react quickly. Nothing is ready to go.”

Reasons for the report not being published are likely to go beyond Whitehall’s paternal view and a desire not to frighten the public. The Telegraph has talked to multiple sources with first hand knowledge of Cygnus and all say the exercise revealed significant caps in the NHS’s “surge capacity”.

These gaps, which included a shortage of ICU beds and PPE, were revealed at a time of austerity. Jeremy Hunt, the then health secretary, and Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, were cutting NHS bed numbers at the time rather than adding capacity. Dame Sally Davies, then chief medical officer, faced similar financial constraints.

There was also cynicism across Whitehall about the epidemiological modeling. The previous chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, ended his term under something of a cloud when the 2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic proved a damp squib relative to the initial modelling.

The same view was taken of forecasting of the 2013–2016 west african Ebola outbreak.

Whatever the reasons, the final report on Exercise Cygnus was buried and its prophetic findings hidden from public view.

At meeting of the Public Health England (PHE) advisory board on 26 April 2017, Paul Cosford, the quango’s director for health protection, said a report “setting out the learning and recommendations” from Cygnus “was in the process of being finalised” but it never saw the light of day.

Tellingly perhaps, NHS England, the body which oversees the running of the NHS and was found most wanting by the report, has no mention of the exercise on its website. It’s high fidelity, government-operated search engine returns nothing for the phrase “Cygnus” despite a board paper on the exercise being unearthed by the Telegraph.

“Our preparations for pandemic influenza were exercised in October 2016 with NHS England participating in Exercise Cygnus. The exercise was set seven weeks into a severe pandemic outbreak and challenged the NHS to review its response to an overwhelmed service with reduced staff availability,” says the paper which was drafted for “clearance” by Matthew Swindells, the then national director of operations and information.

A video (below at 7 minutes 14 seconds) of the meeting shows the NHS England Board considering the paper for just a few moments, with no serious questions being raised. This is despite the document making clear, albeit in the obtuse language of Whitehall, that the NHS had been found wanting by the exercise.

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