Covid-19: International Response

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I start by thanking all our and all international front-line workers; you have put yourselves in harm’s way to keep the planet safe, and we owe you all an enduring debt of gratitude that should never be forgotten. I also thank all the scientists, who are world leaders and, as time moves on, will become world savers.

I ask the Minister how we are taking on the learnings internationally into what we do domestically and, indeed, our international programmes when we are in the midst of this crisis. Are there, for example, learnings from Germany about health spend—40,000 ICU beds, 30,000 of which are ventilator-enabled—or is it more to do with a more decentralised public health system? What lessons from South Korea are we embedding into our programmes and those that we will embark on internationally?

On the tracing app, does my noble friend agree that interoperability is critical if we are to have an international network that seeks to solve the problem, rather than individual nations coming up with apps that, in simple terms, cannot speak to one another? Finally, how we are involving our fabulous tech sector in all our international development work on Covid-19? Distributed ledger technology, for example, could play a critical role, when we get to the vaccine stage, in vaccine provenance. Similarly, we could have an immediate programme of micropayment through DLT-enabled platforms. Does she agree that the solution to the Covid-19 international response will come from the right combination of humanity-led technology?