Today marks five years since a small corner of the front page of the Chronicle “urged calm following a China virus outbreak”.
The news on coronavirus was topped by stories on an Antarctic swim and paid leave for bereaved
parents, but a short interview with then Director of Public Health Dr Sohail Bhatti shone a spotlight on the impending issue.
And for the most part, people were calm.
The story ran and the virus, later known as Covid-19, seemed very distant at the time.
Within weeks Gibraltar was locked down but at this time five years ago, those preparing Gibraltar’s response were already braced for a pandemic.
Amid the calls for calm, the Office of Civil Contingencies led by Ivor Lopez were getting ready for what was to follow.
On January 27, 2020, Civil Contingencies convened a strategic coordinating group for what was then
known as the Wuhan novel coronavirus.
“From that time, clearly, we could see that it was getting worse and worse,” Mr Lopez said.
In January the prognosis was bleak.
The worst-case scenario for Gibraltar was set out in the bunker at No.6 Convent Place.
The working theory at the time was that if the outbreak could not be controlled in early 2020, 60% to 80% population could get infected.
Under that scenario, some 600 people could be hospitalised, 300 people could be in critical care, and 200 people could die.
For pandemic planners, Gibraltar needed to win time.
“It would break the hospital,” Mr Lopez said, reflecting the sentiment at the time.
A planned exercise that February on a terrorist attack was scrapped and changed into a tabletop
pandemic planning exercise.
“If you have everyone infected at the same time, then the hospital would break in terms of their
capacity,” Mr Lopez said.
“Whereas if you manage it over time, at least there is a chance of people recovering.”
Coronavirus was more lethal at the time than the later variants that emerged in the following
months.
In the UK, Gibraltar’s current Director of Public Helen Carter was then the Deputy Regional Director for Public Health in the Midlands.
She witnessed how, in the early days of the pandemic, young health workers were dying.
“These were young, fit, healthy people who had no pre-existing conditions and no underlying
undiagnosed conditions,” she said.
“These were our frontline staff and I think we often forget that as the pandemic progressed, we had vaccines and started to develop some natural immunity to the virus, so we didn’t see those younger people dying.”
“But in the early stages, we have short memories, we forget that there were younger people and, of
course, the vulnerable.”
“We equally had some children with some long-term conditions who died. I think people are going to
be studying different countries’ responses for decades, people will be doing PhDs on what countries’ response did what.”
“It’s very difficult because you’re not comparing like with like, you’re looking at cultural behaviours and, in this part of the Mediterranean, you have an outdoor culture, so you’d have less mixing indoors.”
She added that health officials were braced to deal with a pandemic in their lifetime.
“We knew from a Public Health perspective that another pandemic was yet to come, but we didn’t
know when or what it would look like or how it would affect the population,” she said.
“I don’t think any of us could’ve anticipated how quickly it spread globally.”
She pointed out that in those early stages, there was no vaccine and the hospital pressures were
driving the decisions.
Meanwhile in Gibraltar, flattening the curve to avoid a sharp peak of cases was the objective.
For Civil Contingencies, there is a stark difference between emergency planning and pandemic planning.
Usually an emergency, for example environmental or terrorism-related, affects just one, or at most, a few countries at a time.
Mr Lopez explained that in those scenarios, when one country is in an emergency, others will usually provide aid.
With a global pandemic where every country is affected, everyone is out for themselves.
No country had enough personal protection equipment (PPE) or ventilators to deal with a pandemic, and the world’s factory – China – was shutting down.
Mr Lopez remembered how Gibraltar chartered a private jet to China to pick up PPE.
But the journey in the midst of countries shutting borders and airspace was marred with concern.
Adding to this concern was that US buyers were turning up at airport tarmacs in China offering
significantly higher sums for consignments and leaving the initial buyers without kit.
“It was like the Wild West that the world was dealing with,” Mr Lopez said.
Within this chaos, Gibraltar was trying to secure its own equipment.
He added that Gibraltar worked with the British embassy to secure clearances for pilot Mark Carreras to travel through various airspaces.
He had to fly a much longer route, almost in a “semicircle”, to and from China.
Securing potentially lifesaving equipment was just one part of this.
Every sector of society was affected by an invisible killer.
For Civil Contingencies, a pandemic is a mammoth task that risked cutting through the fabric of
society and leaving frayed threads needing to be weaved back together.
Every part of normal society changed.
For the first time in living memory countries shielded, separated, and isolated the public.
Schools closed, restaurants and non-essential shops closed, and Gibraltar locked down.
“I think that we were so worried, certainly personally, I was so worried about January and going through February and wanting to get things in place with the rest of the team, because clearly this wasn’t just us,” Mr Lopez said.
“I think what we wanted to do was actually get things done before we had a craze and before it
began to spread, because it was the unknown, and we were, like everyone, scared.”
“But the responsibility for this fell on us.”
Additionally, the Government and public services were not geared as a matter of course to deal with a pandemic.
“By January, February, we were already looking at getting the groups together, and clearly
Government wasn’t structured to deal with this,” Mr Lopez said.
“You have the police, but the police deal with certain areas.”
“You have the Fire and Rescue Service, you have the ambulance service, and normally when we talk
about major incidents, something has happened, the people are injured and we need to deal with
it.”
“This was completely different. So now we had to look at how we restructure the whole of
government in order to deal with this specific case.”
He added it was a tough time for decision makers within Government and the GHA, and pointed to
then Minister for Civil Contingencies Samantha Sacramento who, he said, “stepped up to the plate”.
Looking back, Mr Lopez said a lot of lessons were learnt.
“I wish it would have been an exercise,” Mr Lopez said.
“It was what it was, but it was a very difficult time.”
Despite the uncertainty, he added that some elements of the response were inadvertently in place before Covid, with Brexit contingency planning aiding some of the response efforts and other healthcare and basic service provisions identified during this time.
“I think what was really useful, believe it or not, was the work that we had carried out in terms of Brexit and looking at increasing Gibraltar’s resilience as part of the non-negotiated outcome or a no-deal Brexit, which was [a factor] at the time,” he said.
“Given that we had already engaged with partners that were working as multi-agency, that we had
been looking at the resilience of hospitals and other areas as a result of that.”
“I think that when we came to this – some of the work, obviously, Covid was very specific – but
generally, we had a good grasp of the capabilities that one has.”
“Obviously, we then had to shift. But I think that the Brexit work went some way in terms of helping with that.”
