The NHS could have prevented “chaos and panic” had the system not been left wholly unprepared for the pandemic, the editor of a British medical journal has said.

Numerous warnings were issued but these were not heeded, Richard Horton wrote in the Lancet. He cited an example from his journal on 20 January, pointing to a global epidemic: “Preparedness plans should be readied for deployment at short notice, including securing supply chains of pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment, hospital supplies and the necessary human resources to deal with the consequences of a global outbreak of this magnitude.”

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Horton wrote that the government’s Contain-Delay-Mitigate-Research plan had failed. “It failed, in part, because ministers didn’t follow WHO’s advice to ‘test, test, test’ every suspected case. They didn’t isolate and quarantine. They didn’t contact trace.

“These basic principles of public health and infectious disease control were ignored, for reasons that remain opaque. The result has been chaos and panic across the NHS.”

Horton’s warning came as the UK experienced its biggest day-on-day rise in deaths since the Covid-19 outbreak began, while Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock said they had tested positive for the virus and frontline testing of NHS workers was set to begin.

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Horton also expressed concerns over the government’s new Suppress-Shield-Treat-Palliate plan. “This plan, agreed far too late in the course of the outbreak, has left the NHS wholly unprepared for the surge of severely and critically ill patients that will soon come,” he wrote.

A government spokesperson claimed the Lancet article was “inaccurate” and denied that the government was following a Suppress-Shield-Treat-Palliate plan, adding that the policy remained to contain, delay, research and mitigate the outbreak and continued to be guided by the latest science and data.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “The UK’s science-led action plan is led by global experts in the principles of infectious disease control. We have followed a clear plan, underpinned by scientific evidence, to contain, delay, research and mitigate the outbreak.”

The department denied claims in the article that it had not tested, isolated or contact-traced. The spokesperson said: “We acted swiftly to contain the spread of the virus and our world-class surveillance, including intensive contact tracing and quarantining of early cases, helped to slow it significantly – and targeted contract-tracing continues.”

The government had tested more than 100,000 people and was set to increase testing capacity to 25,000 people a day, it added.

It said: “The NHS has been mobilising for months and we are working around the clock to give the NHS and the wider social care sector the equipment and support they need to tackle this outbreak. On Thursday alone over 21m facemasks, 9m aprons, 20m gloves and 700,000 eye protectors were delivered to frontline workers.”

More than 18,000 doctors, nurses and other former NHS staff have volunteered to return to work to fight the virus. The effort came after the NHS England chief executive, Sir Simon Stevens, was forced to defend his track record heading the service, with the country’s proportion of intensive care units before the crisis being among the lowest in Europe.