A damning report has been released on the government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting numerous failures that led to an excessive number of deaths.

Covid inquiry chair Baroness Hallet said that the UK government "prepared for the wrong pandemic" and "failed its citizens".

The report urged "radical reforms", including implementing a new approach to risk assessment, a new approach to developing strategy and holding a UK-wide pandemic response exercise.

Steve Fouch, Head of Comms at the Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF), said the key takeaway from the report was that the government had missed the mark on health crisis planning. 

"There seems to have been an assumption in 2011 that the next 'big outbreak' would be influenza, and that it would be mild," he told Premier. "Which was a strangely naive assumption to have taken, since we know influenza pandemics in the past haven't been mild, and have killed a lot of people." 

Fouch added that the government could have been better prepared for a viral outbreak, given the SARS (Severe Accute Respiratory Syndrome) crisis in 2002, and recent outbreaks of MERS (Middle East Respirartory Syndrome). 

He said: "What was being expressed by the public was a sense that [Covid] was unprecedented, the government was going to make mistakes and we needed to cut them some slack. What then turns out to be the case is that this wasn't unprecedented - there had been plans in place and they hadn't been implemented."

Today's report was the first in a series due to be published by the inquiry.