🔗 Share this article

A damning official inquiry into Britain's handling to the coronavirus situation has concluded that the reaction was "inadequate and belated," stating how enacting restrictions only one week sooner would have saved in excess of 23,000 deaths.

Main Conclusions from the Report

Documented through exceeding seven hundred fifty documents spanning two reports, the results depict a consistent story of procrastination, lack of action as well as an apparent inability to understand from experience.

The narrative about the beginning of the coronavirus in early 2020 is portrayed as especially brutal, describing February as being "a wasted month."

Ministerial Shortcomings Emphasized

• It questions the reasons why the then prime minister did not to lead a single gathering of the emergency crisis committee during February.
• Measures to Covid essentially halted throughout the mid-term vacation.
• By the second week of March, the circumstances was "little short of catastrophic," due to no proper plan, a lack of testing and consequently no clear picture regarding the extent to which the coronavirus had spread.

Potential Impact

While admitting that the move to enforce a lockdown had been historic as well as exceptionally hard, enacting other action to curb the circulation of coronavirus more quickly might have resulted in such measures may not have been necessary, or alternatively proved of shorter duration.

By the time a lockdown became unavoidable, the report stated, had it been imposed on 16 March, projections suggested this could have lowered the count of deaths in England in the earliest phase of the pandemic by nearly 50%, representing over 20,000 lives saved.

The omission to understand the extent of the risk, or the urgency for action it necessitated, led to the fact that by the time the option of a mandatory lockdown was first considered it proved too delayed so that a lockdown had become unavoidable.

Recurring Errors

The report also pointed out how many of the same failures – responding belatedly and underestimating the rate and effect of the pandemic's progression – occurred again later in 2020, when restrictions were eased only to be belatedly reimposed because of contagious new strains.

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

Total Impact

The UK experienced one of the worst pandemic epidemics within Europe, recording approximately 240,000 virus-related lives lost.

This investigation constitutes another from the ongoing investigation regarding each part of the response and handling of the pandemic, that started in previous years and is expected to run through 2027.