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A damning government inquiry regarding the UK's handling of the pandemic crisis has found that the reaction was "too little, too late," noting that enacting confinement measures only a single week before could have spared over 23,000 lives.

Main Conclusions of the Investigation

Documented in exceeding seven hundred and fifty documents across two reports, the findings portray a consistent narrative showing delay, inaction as well as an apparent incapacity to learn lessons.

The description regarding the start of the coronavirus in the first months of 2020 is especially brutal, calling February as "a wasted month."

Government Failures Noted

• It questions the reasons why Boris Johnson neglected to chair a single gathering of the Cobra crisis committee in that period.
• Action to the pandemic largely stopped throughout the school break.
• By the second week of that March, the situation was described as "almost catastrophic," due to no proper strategy, insufficient testing and therefore little understanding of the degree to which the coronavirus had circulated.

What Could Have Been

Even though recognizing the fact that the choice to enforce confinement was historic and exceptionally hard, enacting further steps to reduce the circulation of Covid sooner would have allowed a lockdown may not have been necessary, or alternatively have been of shorter duration.

Once confinement was inevitable, the investigation noted, if implemented imposed a week earlier, projections showed that could have cut the number of deaths within England during the initial wave of Covid by around half, which equals over 20,000 lives saved.

The inability to recognize the extent of the threat, and the need for action it necessitated, resulted in the fact that when the chance of enforced restrictions was first considered it proved belated so that a lockdown became unavoidable.

Repeated Mistakes

The inquiry additionally highlighted how many of the same errors – responding with delay as well as underestimating the speed together with consequences of Covid’s spread – were then repeated later in 2020, as controls were lifted and then delayed restored because of infectious new strains.

The report describes this "unjustifiable," adding that the government were unable to improve over repeated waves.

Final Count

The UK suffered among the most severe coronavirus crises in Europe, with about 240 thousand Covid-related lives lost.

The inquiry constitutes the second from the national investigation covering each part of the management as well as handling to Covid, that began previously and is scheduled to continue until 2027.