Many lives lost due to UK lockdown delay: Expert

LONDON: An epidemiologist on a key government committee said on Sunday that ‘a lot of lives’ in the UK have been lost because the lockdown was imposed as late as March 23.

John Edmunds, who is on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that provides scientific inputs to government decisions, believes that the lockdown in the UK should have been announced earlier.

Edmunds said: “We should have gone into lockdown earlier. I think it would have been very hard to pull the trigger at that point but I wish we had - I wish we had gone into lockdown earlier. I think that has cost a lot of lives unfortunately.”

But he told BBC that it would have been “hard to do it” earlier than March 23 because the data the Boris Johnson Government had in the early part of March and “our kind of situational awareness” was “really quite poor”.

Health secretary Matt Hancock, however, responded to the criticism by insisting that the government had made the “right decisions at the right time” and had been guided by a “balance” of scientific opinions on the issue. Asked if he was sure that the lockdown’s timing had not cost lives, he said: “I am sure, as I keep looking back on that period, I’m sure that taking into account everything we knew at that moment - my view is that we made the right decisions at the right time.”

Meanwhile, for the first time since lockdown on March 23, the rise in deaths over 24 hours came down to double figures on Sunday – 77 – as Scotland and Northern Ireland reported no new deaths, reinforcing official assessment that the UK is past the peak.

Official figures released by the Department for Health and Social Care showed a cumulative death toll of 40,542 and 286,194 cases – lowest daily rise in fatalities at 77 and 1,326 cases.