Limitations to Contingency Measures: Reflections from COVID-19 Surges in the UK

Alfandre et al. (2021) helpfully outlines the case for attending to contingency planning as well as to crisis measures during a pandemic. The authors provides a helpful framework for reflecting on the experiences of healthcare staff during COVID-19 to develop a more robust contingency phase. We do so, ourselves, in the context of the United Kingdom, particularly London where the prevalence of COVID-19 stretched resources despite considerable and continuing efforts to increase capacity as the depth of the crisis was understood. Recognizing the inevitable increase in cases once community transmission took hold, the UK government’s strategy was to keep case load manageably within the capacity of the National Health Service (NHS). All public health interventions were modeled and planned accordingly with insufficient regard to contingencies