🔗 Share this article

A critical government investigation regarding Britain's response to the pandemic situation determined that the reaction were "inadequate and belated," noting that imposing a lockdown just seven days before might have spared more than twenty thousand lives.

Main Conclusions from the Investigation

Documented in over seven hundred and fifty documents across two reports, the results paint a clear picture showing procrastination, lack of action and an evident incapacity to learn from experience.

The account concerning the onset of Covid-19 in the first months of 2020 is portrayed as especially brutal, labeling February as "a wasted month."

Official Shortcomings Emphasized

• It questions why the then prime minister did not to convene one gathering of the Cobra response team in that period.
• Measures to Covid largely halted throughout the half-term holiday week.
• During the second week of that March, the state of affairs was described as "little short of catastrophic," due to inadequate plan, no testing and therefore no understanding about the extent to which Covid had spread.

Possible Outcome

Even though recognizing that the move to impose restrictions had been without precedent as well as exceptionally hard, taking additional measures to slow the spread of the virus more quickly could have meant that one could have been prevented, or at least proved of shorter duration.

By the time confinement became unavoidable, the report went on, if implemented imposed a week earlier, estimates suggested this would have cut the total of fatalities across England in the first wave of the virus by around half, which equals over 20,000 fatalities avoided.

The failure to understand the scale of the danger, or the immediacy for action it necessitated, resulted in the fact that when the option of enforced restrictions was first discussed it proved belated and such measures became unavoidable.

Repeated Mistakes

The report further noted how a number of of the same errors – reacting with delay and minimizing the rate together with impact of the virus's transmission – occurred again in the latter part of 2020, when measures were eased only to be late reimposed in the face of spreading variants.

It describes such repetition "inexcusable," adding how officials did not to absorb experience through multiple outbreaks.

Final Count

The UK experienced one of the deadliest Covid outbreaks in Europe, with about 240 thousand Covid-related deaths.

The inquiry is the second from the public review regarding each part of the handling as well as handling of the pandemic, that started previously and is scheduled to run until 2027.