UK's slow virus lockdown cost 1000s of lives: report
The British government waited too long to impose a lockdown in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, missing a chance to contain the disease and leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, lawmakers concluded Tuesday in a hard-hitting report.
The deadly delay resulted from ministers' failure to question the recommendations of scientific advisers, resulting in a dangerous level of "groupthink" that caused them to dismiss the more aggressive strategies adopted in East and Southeast Asia, according to the joint report from the House of Commons' science and health committees.
It was only when Britain's National Health Service risked being overwhelmed by rapidly rising infections that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative government finally ordered a lockdown in late March 2020.
"There was a desire to avoid a lockdown because of the immense harm it would entail to the economy, normal health services and society,'' the report said. "In the absence of other strategies such as rigorous case isolation, a meaningful test-and-trace operation, and robust border controls, a full lockdown was inevitable and should have come sooner.''
Cabinet minister Stephen Barclay defended the government's response, saying "decisions were taken on the evidence and the scientific advice at the time." "It was an unprecedented pandemic. We were learning about it as we went through, and of course with hindsight, there's things we know about it now that we didn't know at the time," Barclay told British broadcaster Sky News.
The U.K. parliamentary report comes amid frustration with the timetable for a formal public inquiry into the government's response to COVID-19, which Johnson says will start next spring. Lawmakers said their inquiry was designed to uncover why Britain performed "significantly worse" than many other countries during the early days of the pandemic. Britain has recorded more than 137,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest toll in Europe after Russia.
The 150-page report is based on testimony from 50 witnesses, including former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and former government insider Dominic Cummings. It was unanimously approved by 22 lawmakers from the three largest parties in Parliament: the governing Conservatives and the opposition Labour Party and the Scottish National Party. The committees praised the government's early focus on vaccines as the ultimate way out of the pandemic and its decision to invest in vaccine development. These decisions led to Britain's successful inoculation program, which has seen almost 80% of people 12 and over now fully vaccinated.
"Millions of lives will ultimately be saved as a result of the global vaccine effort in which the U.K. has played a leading part," the committees said. But they also criticized the government's test-and-trace program, saying its slow, uncertain and often chaotic performance hampered Britain's response to the pandemic.