🔗 Share this article

A critical government report into Britain's management to the coronavirus emergency has concluded that the reaction was "too little, too late," declaring how enacting restrictions just seven days earlier might have spared more than 20,000 deaths.

Primary Results of the Investigation

Documented through exceeding 750 documents spanning two reports, the findings paint an unmistakable narrative showing delay, inaction as well as an apparent failure to learn from experience.

The account concerning the start of the pandemic in the first months of 2020 is particularly harsh, describing the month of February as "a wasted month."

Government Errors Highlighted

• It raises questions about the reasons why the then prime minister neglected to lead a single gathering of the government's Cobra crisis committee that month.
• The response to Covid effectively halted during the half-term holiday week.
• By the second week of March, the state of affairs was described as "little short of calamitous," due to no proper preparation, a lack of testing and thus no understanding of the degree to which the coronavirus had spread.

What Could Have Been

Although recognizing the fact that the decision to implement confinement had been without precedent as well as exceptionally hard, enacting further steps to slow the transmission of coronavirus earlier might have resulted in that one might have been avoided, or have been less lengthy.

Once a lockdown became unavoidable, the report noted, had it been enforced on March 16, projections suggested this could have lowered the number of deaths across England during the initial wave of Covid by nearly 50%, equating to 23,000 deaths prevented.

The inability to recognize the scale of the threat, or the immediacy for action it required, resulted in the fact that once the chance of enforced restrictions was initially contemplated it was already too late so that restrictions were necessary.

Recurring Errors

The investigation further highlighted how several similar errors – reacting with delay as well as downplaying the speed and consequences of the pandemic's progression – were then repeated in the latter part of 2020, as controls were removed and subsequently belatedly reimposed because of contagious mutations.

It labels such repetition "inexcusable," noting that those in charge did not to improve over multiple outbreaks.

Total Impact

The United Kingdom experienced among the deadliest pandemic outbreaks within Europe, recording approximately two hundred forty thousand pandemic fatalities.

The inquiry constitutes another by the national inquiry into each part of the response and management to Covid, that was launched previously and is due to continue until 2027.