🔗 Share this article

An harsh government inquiry into the United Kingdom's response of the coronavirus situation has concluded that the response were "too little, too late," declaring that enacting restrictions just one week sooner might have prevented in excess of 23,000 deaths.

Main Conclusions from the Report

Outlined in more than 750 documents spanning two reports, the conclusions depict a consistent picture showing procrastination, lack of action as well as an apparent failure to understand from experience.

The narrative about the onset of the coronavirus in the first months of 2020 has been described as notably critical, labeling February as "a month of inaction."

Ministerial Shortcomings Emphasized

• It questions why Boris Johnson did not to chair any gathering of the government's Cobra emergency committee in that period.
• Action to the pandemic largely halted over the half-term holiday week.
• By the second week of March, the circumstances was described as "little short of calamitous," with inadequate preparation, a lack of testing and therefore little understanding regarding how far the coronavirus was spreading.

Possible Outcome

Even though acknowledging the fact that the choice to impose a lockdown had been historic as well as exceptionally hard, implementing other action to slow the transmission of Covid sooner might have resulted in that one could have been prevented, or at least proved of shorter duration.

By the time a lockdown was inevitable, the inquiry authors went on, had it been enforced on March 16, projections showed this would have lowered the total of deaths in England in the earliest phase of the virus by around half, equating to 23,000 deaths prevented.

The failure to appreciate the scale of the threat, and the need for measures it necessitated, meant the fact that by the time the chance of enforced restrictions was first discussed it proved too late so that such measures were unavoidable.

Recurring Errors

The investigation further highlighted how a number of similar errors – reacting too slowly as well as downplaying the speed together with effect of the virus's transmission – occurred again later in 2020, when measures were eased and then delayed restored in the face of infectious mutations.

It labels such repetition "inexcusable," stating how the government failed to improve through multiple outbreaks.

Final Count

The UK endured among the deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in Europe, with approximately 240 thousand virus-related lives lost.

This report is another by the national review regarding all aspects of the management and response of the pandemic, which started two years ago and is scheduled to run into 2027.