She said, for example: “The legislative framework that became the Corona Act.
“We have stood up new testing capacity, we have stood up new PPE capacity.
“We have done this on the basis of the science of this pandemic.
“I think we all accept that these are unprecedented times and that this virus is creating problems on a weekly basis.”
Former regional director of public health Professor John Ashton also spoke about the findings on the Government’s failure.
He told GMB: “We were in a bad shape, even before, in my view, the Prime Minister failed to chair COBRA at the beginning of Februar.
“At that point, he would have been in a position to see where we were and get started on catching up with the PPE and the testing that we’ve suffered from ever since.”
Professor Ashton dismissed the defence that the UK was in a global competition to get limited resources when the need became clear.
He said: “There are other countries that have done much better than us: New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, to mention just three, there are others as well.”