🔗 Share this article

A damning official inquiry into the UK's management to the coronavirus situation has found that the reaction was "insufficient and delayed," stating how imposing a lockdown only one week sooner could have spared in excess of 20,000 lives.

Primary Results of the Inquiry

Documented across over seven hundred and fifty sections covering two parts, the findings portray a clear story showing procrastination, lack of action and an apparent failure to understand from experience.

The description about the beginning of the pandemic in the first months of 2020 is portrayed as especially harsh, calling the month of February as being "a lost month."

Ministerial Failures Highlighted

• The report questions the reasons why the UK leader neglected to convene a single gathering of the emergency crisis committee during February.
• Measures to the pandemic largely stopped during the school break.
• In the second week of March, the state of affairs was "nearly disastrous," due to no proper plan, no testing and therefore no understanding of the degree to which Covid was spreading.

Potential Impact

Even though recognizing the fact that the decision to impose restrictions was historic and hugely difficult, enacting further steps to reduce the transmission of the virus sooner could have meant such measures could have been prevented, or proved of shorter duration.

By the time a lockdown became unavoidable, the investigation stated, if it had been introduced a week earlier, estimates suggested that could have cut the total of lives lost within England in the earliest phase of Covid by around half, which equals 23,000 fatalities avoided.

The failure to appreciate the scale of the danger, and the immediacy for measures it required, meant the fact that once the possibility of enforced restrictions was first discussed it was already too delayed so that a lockdown became necessary.

Ongoing Failures

The investigation also noted how many of the same errors – reacting with delay as well as underestimating the pace and effect of the pandemic's progression – occurred again in the latter part of 2020, when measures were removed and subsequently delayed reintroduced because of contagious mutations.

It calls this "inexcusable," adding that the government were unable to learn lessons over successive outbreaks.

Overall Toll

The United Kingdom suffered one of the most severe Covid epidemics in Europe, amounting to around 240,000 Covid-related fatalities.

This investigation is the latest from the ongoing inquiry into each part of the management and handling to the coronavirus, which was launched in previous years and is expected to run into 2027.