An earlier lockdown ‘may have halved the death toll’

THE NUMBER of deaths from coronavirus could have been halved if the lockdown had been introduced a week earlier, an expert who advised the Government on restrictions has admitted.

Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, told the Science and Technology Committee thousands of deaths could have been prevented with earlier action.

However, he explained that based on what was known about transmission and fatalities at the time, the actions taken were warranted.

Prof Ferguson said: “The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced.

“So, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.

“So whilst I think the measures, given what we knew about this virus then in terms of its transmission and fatality, were warranted, certainly had we introduced them earlier we would have seen many fewer deaths.”

The UK was put into lockdown on March 23 in an unprecedented step to attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus.

Early in the outbreak, experts had estimated that the number of coronavirus deaths in the UK would be unlikely to exceed 20,000.

Yesterday the total number of deaths in the UK was more than 41,000.

When asked what had gone wrong, Prof Ferguson said: “I think two things – one is a paper actually out in Nature, which highlights that around about that time, just before lockdown happened, the first two weeks of March, we probably had 1,500 to 2,000 infections imported from Italy and Spain, which we just hadn’t seen in the surveillance data, until that point.

“So there is much heavier seeding than we’d expected.”

He added: “The second part, which I think would have been more avoidable, is about half of those deaths occurred in care homes.”

He continued: “And we did all this working under the assumption which was Government policy at the time that care homes would be shielded from infection.”

At the daily No 10 briefing yesterday, the chief medical officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, declined to be drawn on Prof Ferguson’s claims.

But he said: “I think a variety of different people are going to come with different answers on the timing question. Part of the problem that we had at that stage is that we had very limited information about this virus.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson added: “Of course we are going to have to look back on all of this and learn lessons that we can.

“But, frankly, I think a lot of these questions are still premature.

“There are lots of things, lots of data, things that we still don’t know, and this epidemic has a long way to go, alas.”