40,000 PEOPLE IN U.K. COULD DIE, PROFESSOR SAYS.

LONDON • The British government was too slow to react on a number of fronts to the novel coronavirus outbreak that could cause the deaths of 40,000 people in the United Kingdom, a leading public health professor told lawmakers on Friday.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson initially refrained from approving the stringent controls that other European leaders imposed but then closed down the country when projections showed a quarter of a million people could die in the United Kingdom.

So far, more than 14,576 people with COVID-19 have died in British hospitals, though new official data indicates the true death toll could be much larger.

“Where were the system errors that led us to have probably the highest death rates in Europe?” Anthony Costello, professor of International Child Health and Director of the UCL Institute for Global Health, told the Health and Social Care Committee.

“We have to face the reality of that: We were too slow with a number of things,” Costello said. “We could see 40,000 deaths by the time it’s over.”

Costello, a pediatrician who is an expert in epidemiology, said the government should make sure its response to the second and additional waves of infection was not too slow.

The U.K. has the fifth highest official death toll from COVID-19 in the world, after the United States, Italy, Spain and France, though the figure only covers hospital fatalities and the real number is probably much higher.

British ministers have defended their response to the outbreak, saying they followed scientific advice and have responded with urgency in what amounts to a war-like situation.

Costello said the U.K. needed widescale testing and the right systems in place to deal with further flare-ups of the outbreak.

“The recent estimates, even from the chief scientific officer, is that after this wave — we could see 40,000 deaths by the time it’s over — we could only have maybe 10 per cent, 15 per cent of the population infected or covered,” he said.

“So the idea of herd immunity would mean another five, six waves maybe in order to get to 60 per cent,” he said. “We have got to pray the vaccinologists come up.”

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said mass community testing was part of the British strategy, though the government has yet to find an antibody test that is accurate enough to be used.

He was questioned by lawmakers about the daily death toll data — which gives hospital deaths but ignores deaths at home or in care homes.

Hancock said the rate of deaths due to COVID-19 in care homes was higher than the 2 per cent of the total indicated by official data.