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A critical independent inquiry into the UK's handling to the pandemic crisis has found which the response was "insufficient and delayed," declaring how enacting a lockdown just seven days sooner might have spared over 23,000 fatalities.

Primary Results of the Investigation

Documented across exceeding seven hundred fifty sections covering two reports, the results paint an unmistakable story showing procrastination, inaction and an evident incapacity to absorb from mistakes.

The description regarding the onset of the coronavirus in the first months of 2020 is portrayed as particularly critical, calling the month of February as "a lost month."

Official Errors Highlighted

• It questions why Boris Johnson failed to lead any session of the Cobra response team in that period.
• The response to the pandemic largely stopped over the half-term holiday week.
• In the second week of March, the state of affairs had become "little short of disastrous," due to inadequate preparation, no testing and therefore no clear picture regarding the extent to which the virus had spread.

Possible Outcome

While recognizing the fact that the decision to implement a lockdown was unprecedented and hugely difficult, implementing further steps to curb the transmission of Covid more quickly might have resulted in that one may not have been necessary, or alternatively proved of shorter duration.

When restrictions was necessary, the report stated, if it had been introduced on 16 March, modelling suggested this could have reduced the number of deaths in England during the initial wave of the pandemic by nearly 50%, which equals twenty-three thousand deaths prevented.

The inability to understand the magnitude of the danger, and the immediacy for measures it required, meant that by the time the option of compulsory confinement was first considered it had become too delayed and restrictions became inevitable.

Repeated Mistakes

The inquiry further pointed out how many of these failures – reacting too slowly and downplaying the pace and impact of the virus's transmission – were then repeated later in 2020, when restrictions were lifted and subsequently belatedly restored because of infectious mutations.

It calls this "inexcusable," adding that the government were unable to improve through successive outbreaks.

Final Count

The UK endured among the most severe coronavirus crises within Europe, with about two hundred forty thousand Covid-related fatalities.

This report is the second from the national investigation into all aspects of the management and response to the coronavirus, that began in previous years and is scheduled to proceed into 2027.