🔗 Share this article

An critical independent report concerning the UK's response of the Covid emergency determined which the reaction were "too little, too late," stating how imposing confinement measures only a single week before might have spared in excess of twenty thousand fatalities.

Main Conclusions of the Inquiry

Outlined across more than 750 pages covering two volumes, the results paint an unmistakable picture showing hesitation, lack of action as well as an apparent inability to learn lessons.

The account about the start of Covid-19 in the first months of 2020 is notably harsh, calling February as "a lost month."

Government Failures Noted

• It raises questions about the reasons why Boris Johnson did not to convene one gathering of the government's Cobra response team in that period.
• Measures to the virus largely halted over the half-term holiday week.
• During the second week of March, the state of affairs was "nearly catastrophic," with no proper strategy, insufficient testing and thus no understanding about how far the virus was spreading.

Possible Outcome

Although acknowledging the fact that the move to enforce restrictions had been unprecedented as well as exceptionally hard, implementing other action to reduce the circulation of coronavirus more quickly could have meant such measures could have been prevented, or alternatively proved shorter.

When confinement became unavoidable, the investigation stated, if implemented introduced on 16 March, projections showed that might have lowered the total of deaths within England in the earliest phase of the pandemic by almost half, which equals twenty-three thousand lives saved.

The failure to recognize the scale of the risk, or the immediacy for action it required, resulted in that once the chance of a mandatory lockdown was first discussed it had become belated and a lockdown became unavoidable.

Ongoing Failures

The inquiry additionally pointed out how many of these mistakes – reacting too slowly as well as downplaying the rate and impact of the pandemic's progression – occurred again later in 2020, when measures were eased only to be belatedly reimposed in the face of infectious new strains.

The report describes such repetition "inexcusable," noting that the government did not to absorb experience through multiple outbreaks.

Final Count

Britain experienced one of the deadliest Covid crises in Europe, recording about 240,000 virus-related deaths.

This investigation constitutes the second from the public investigation into all aspects of the management as well as response to Covid, which started previously and is expected to run into 2027.