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A harsh official inquiry into the UK's response to the Covid crisis determined that the reaction was "inadequate and belated," declaring that implementing a lockdown only seven days before could have spared over 23,000 fatalities.

Main Conclusions of the Investigation

Outlined in over seven hundred and fifty sections across two parts, the results depict a consistent picture of hesitation, inaction as well as a seeming incapacity to understand from mistakes.

The description concerning the onset of Covid-19 at the beginning of 2020 is notably harsh, labeling the month of February as "a wasted month."

Government Shortcomings Emphasized

• It questions why Boris Johnson did not to chair a single session of the Cobra emergency committee during February.
• Measures to the pandemic effectively stopped over the half-term holiday week.
• During the second week of March, the circumstances was described as "almost catastrophic," due to a lack of preparation, no testing and therefore little understanding regarding the degree to which the coronavirus had spread.

Possible Outcome

While admitting that the move to impose restrictions had been without precedent and hugely difficult, implementing additional measures to slow the transmission of coronavirus more quickly could have meant such measures may not have been necessary, or proved of shorter duration.

Once restrictions became unavoidable, the inquiry authors stated, if implemented introduced on 16 March, projections indicated this might have cut the total of fatalities within England during the initial wave of Covid by almost half, representing over 20,000 fatalities avoided.

The inability to appreciate the scale of the danger, and the urgency for action it necessitated, resulted in that once the chance of a mandatory lockdown was first considered it proved too late so that such measures had become inevitable.

Recurring Errors

The inquiry also highlighted that a number of of these failures – responding belatedly as well as downplaying the pace together with impact of Covid’s spread – were then repeated later in 2020, as controls were lifted and subsequently belatedly restored because of spreading variants.

It calls such repetition "unjustifiable," stating that officials failed to learn lessons during repeated waves.

Final Count

Britain suffered among the deadliest pandemic outbreaks in Europe, recording approximately 240 thousand pandemic lives lost.

This investigation constitutes the latest from the public investigation into every element of the response as well as response of the pandemic, which began in previous years and is scheduled to continue until 2027.