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A critical government inquiry into Britain's response to the coronavirus crisis has found that the response were "inadequate and belated," stating how enacting restrictions only a single week before could have saved more than 23,000 fatalities.

Main Conclusions from the Inquiry

Documented in exceeding seven hundred fifty pages spanning two parts, the findings paint a consistent story of procrastination, failure to act and a seeming failure to learn from mistakes.

The narrative concerning the start of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020 is particularly harsh, describing February as being "a lost month."

Official Failures Noted

• It raises questions about the reasons why Boris Johnson neglected to chair a single gathering of the government's Cobra response team that month.
• The response to the virus largely halted throughout the half-term holiday week.
• During the second week of that March, the circumstances was described as "nearly calamitous," due to a lack of plan, a lack of testing and therefore no clear picture regarding the degree to which Covid was spreading.

Possible Outcome

Although admitting that the choice to implement restrictions proved to be historic as well as extremely challenging, taking further steps to reduce the transmission of coronavirus sooner would have allowed that one could have been prevented, or proved shorter.

By the time confinement was inevitable, the inquiry authors stated, had it been introduced on 16 March, estimates suggested that would have cut the number of deaths within England during the initial wave of Covid by almost half, representing twenty-three thousand fatalities avoided.

The omission to recognize the scale of the threat, and the urgency for action it required, meant the fact that when the option of compulsory confinement was first considered it proved belated so that restrictions became unavoidable.

Ongoing Failures

The report further highlighted that a number of similar failures – responding too slowly and minimizing the speed together with effect of the virus's transmission – occurred again in the latter part of 2020, as restrictions were lifted and then late restored in the face of spreading variants.

The report calls this "unjustifiable," stating how those in charge did not to absorb experience over multiple phases.

Overall Toll

The UK endured one of the deadliest pandemic epidemics across Europe, recording around 240 thousand pandemic lives lost.

This investigation constitutes another by the national inquiry covering all aspects of the handling and handling of the pandemic, which began in previous years and is expected to run through 2027.