Families bereaved by Covid have expressed pain at revelations that a government exercise modelling a large-scale coronavirus outbreak recommended four years before the pandemic that better preparations were needed in key areas including building stockpiles of personal protective equipment (PPE) and a contact-tracing system.

“Our loved ones might still be with us today, if only the government had followed their own recommendations,” said Lobby Akinnola, the spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, which represents more than 4,000 bereaved families.

The group spoke out after the Guardian revealed the previously confidential report into Exercise Alice, in which senior health officials war-gamed cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers-CoV) arriving in London and Birmingham and spreading rapidly. It warned of the need for stockpiles of PPE, a computerised contact-tracing system and screening for overseas travel.

“For the tens of thousands of families that lost loved ones as a direct consequence of the lack of PPE, ineffectual contact-tracing systems or the failures in screening for foreign travel, this news is extremely painful,” Akinnola said. “We can’t help asking what is the point in the department of health carrying out these exercises if they’re just going to ignore them when a crisis actually hits?”

The Department of Health and Social Care has said Mers differed from Covid-19 and that “the results of Exercise Alice have been incorporated into ongoing planning work”. But Labour said the emergence of the report, which warned of actions to prepare for a potentially fatal coronavirus that spreads asymptomatically and attacks respiratory systems, showed “devastating incompetence at the top of government with the most tragic of consequences”.

“Ministers were complacent, hubristic and asleep despite the warning signs,” said Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary. “What’s more, years of Tory cutbacks left us with a weakened NHS lacking the beds and staff numbers needed when the crisis hit.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP for Brighton who had been pushing for the report to be released in parliament, said: “We now know beyond any doubt that there was an utter lack of preparedness by this government against virtually every basic measure to keep people as safe as possible in the event of a pandemic – and that they ignored warning after warning of the likely consequences. The promised public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic should be expanded in scope, with its interim findings made available before the next general election.”

The government initially refused to release the report under the freedom of information act to Dr Moosa Qureshi, a clinician and transparency campaigner, because it could “lead to loss of public confidence in the government’s and the NHS’s Covid-19 response … based on misinterpretation of the report.”