Restrictions a Week Before Would Have Saved Twenty-Three Thousand Fatalities, Covid Report Finds
A harsh official report regarding the UK's response of the pandemic emergency has concluded that the response was "too little, too late," stating that imposing a lockdown only seven days before would have prevented more than twenty thousand fatalities.
Primary Results of the Report
Documented across exceeding 750 sections covering two reports, the findings paint a clear picture of procrastination, lack of action as well as a seeming inability to understand from mistakes.
The account about the beginning of the coronavirus in the first months of 2020 has been described as notably brutal, describing the month of February as being "a wasted month."
Official Failures Highlighted
- It questions the reasons why the then prime minister failed to convene a single session of the Cobra emergency committee during February.
- The response to Covid essentially halted over the mid-term vacation.
- During the second week in March, the state of affairs was described as "almost calamitous," due to inadequate preparation, no testing and thus no understanding about the degree to which the coronavirus had spread.
Potential Impact
Even though acknowledging the fact that the move to implement restrictions had been without precedent and exceptionally hard, implementing additional measures to reduce the spread of Covid earlier would have allowed a lockdown could have been prevented, or have been of shorter duration.
By the time restrictions became unavoidable, the report noted, if it had been enforced on March 16, estimates showed that could have lowered the number of deaths within England in the earliest phase of the virus by around half, representing 23,000 deaths prevented.
The inability to understand the magnitude of the risk, or the urgency for action it required, meant the fact that when the possibility of a mandatory lockdown was initially contemplated it had become too delayed and such measures became unavoidable.
Ongoing Failures
The inquiry additionally noted how a number of similar errors – reacting too slowly and minimizing the rate and impact of the virus's transmission – occurred again subsequently in 2020, as controls were lifted and then late restored in the face of spreading new strains.
It labels such repetition "unjustifiable," noting that the government did not to learn lessons during multiple outbreaks.
Overall Toll
Britain suffered one of the deadliest coronavirus crises across Europe, with about two hundred forty thousand Covid-related lives lost.
The inquiry represents the second by the public inquiry into every element of the management and handling to the coronavirus, that began two years ago and is expected to continue until 2027.
