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An harsh government investigation into the UK's response of the Covid situation has found that the reaction were "too little, too late," declaring how implementing confinement measures even one week before would have saved in excess of 23,000 fatalities.

Key Findings from the Inquiry

Outlined across over seven hundred and fifty documents covering two parts, the findings depict a clear narrative of procrastination, inaction and a seeming incapacity to understand from experience.

The narrative regarding the beginning of the coronavirus in early 2020 is portrayed as particularly harsh, calling the month of February as being "a month of inaction."

Official Errors Noted

• It raises questions about why Boris Johnson neglected to lead any meeting of the government's Cobra response team during February.
• Measures to the virus effectively halted during the school break.
• In the second week of that March, the state of affairs had become "almost disastrous," with inadequate preparation, no testing and therefore no clear picture about how far the coronavirus was spreading.

Possible Outcome

Even though acknowledging that the move to impose confinement proved to be without precedent as well as hugely difficult, taking other action to slow the transmission of the virus earlier could have meant a lockdown may not have been necessary, or at least proved of shorter duration.

Once a lockdown was necessary, the inquiry authors stated, if it had been enforced a week earlier, modelling showed this might have lowered the number of deaths within England in the earliest phase of Covid by almost half, representing twenty-three thousand deaths prevented.

The failure to understand the magnitude of the threat, and the immediacy of response it demanded, led to the fact that once the option of enforced restrictions was first considered it was already too late so that such measures became necessary.

Recurring Errors

The report also noted that many similar errors – responding with delay and minimizing the pace together with impact of Covid’s spread – occurred again subsequently in 2020, when controls were lifted and subsequently delayed reimposed in the face of infectious variants.

It calls such repetition "unjustifiable," adding how those in charge did not to absorb experience during repeated outbreaks.

Total Impact

The United Kingdom experienced one of the most severe coronavirus outbreaks in Europe, amounting to about 240 thousand pandemic deaths.

The inquiry represents the second by the national inquiry covering every element of the management and handling of the pandemic, that started two years ago and is scheduled to run into 2027.