Report says UK’s slow virus lockdown cost 1,000s of lives
A UK parliamentary report says Britain’s Conservative government waited
Britain’s failure to impose a lockdown in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic cost thousands of unnecessary deaths and ranks among the country’s worst public health blunders, lawmakers concluded yesterday in the nation’s first comprehensive report on the pandemic.
The deadly delay derived from the failure of British government ministers 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 to limit infections, the report said.
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.
“Decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic — and the advice that led to them — rank as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced,” states the joint report from the House of Commons’ science and health committees. “Painful though it is, the UK must learn what lessons it can of why this happened if we are to ensure it is not repeated.”
Lawmakers said their inquiry was designed to uncover why the UK performed “significantly worse” than many other countries during the initial period of the pandemic. The UK has recorded more than 137,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest toll in Europe after Russia.
But government officials said they did what they could with the information they had in a time of crisis.
“It was an unprecedented pandemic,? Cabinet minister Stephen Barclay told Sky News. “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.”
Bereaved families reacted to the parliamentary report with outrage, furious that the people who died of Covid-19 received scant mention in the 150-page document.