🔗 Share this article

A damning government report into Britain's handling of the Covid situation has found which the response were "too little, too late," stating that enacting a lockdown even a single week sooner would have saved in excess of 20,000 lives.

Primary Results from the Report

Outlined through exceeding 750 pages across two parts, the findings portray an unmistakable story showing delay, failure to act and a seeming incapacity to learn from experience.

The description regarding the start of the coronavirus in the first months of 2020 is portrayed as especially critical, calling the month of February as "a lost month."

Official Failures Noted

• The report questions the reasons why Boris Johnson did not to convene one meeting of the Cobra emergency committee in that period.
• The response to the pandemic effectively paused over the half-term holiday week.
• In the second week of that March, the situation had become "little short of disastrous," with inadequate preparation, insufficient testing and consequently little understanding about the degree to which Covid had circulated.

Potential Impact

Although recognizing the fact that the decision to enforce confinement had been unprecedented and exceptionally hard, enacting further steps to curb the spread of the virus sooner could have meant a lockdown might have been avoided, or alternatively been of shorter duration.

By the time restrictions became unavoidable, the report went on, if it had been enforced on 16 March, projections suggested this might have lowered the total of lives lost across England during the initial wave of the virus by nearly 50%, which equals over 20,000 fatalities avoided.

The failure to understand the scale of the threat, or the urgency for action it required, led to that once the possibility of compulsory confinement was first considered it proved belated so that a lockdown became inevitable.

Recurring Errors

The investigation also pointed out that many of these failures – responding belatedly as well as downplaying the rate together with consequences of Covid’s spread – occurred again subsequently in 2020, as controls were lifted only to be late restored in the face of contagious mutations.

The report describes this "inexcusable," adding that those in charge were unable to learn lessons through repeated outbreaks.

Final Count

The UK suffered among the deadliest Covid outbreaks in Europe, recording approximately 240,000 pandemic deaths.

The inquiry constitutes the latest by the ongoing inquiry covering all aspects of the response as well as response of the pandemic, that started previously and is due to continue through 2027.