■ ‘DITHERING THAT MEANT 13,000 LOST THEIR LIVES’
MORE than 13,000 coronavirus deaths could have been avoided had Boris Johnson been quicker to impose the lockdown, a report claims.
If the prime minister had announced the restrictions, including business closures and the ‘stay at home’ order, a week earlier on March 16, instead of March 23, about 8,000 hospital deaths could have been avoided, according to data company Edge Health.
And 13,000 could have been prevented if the order had been given on March 12, say researchers commissioned for Channel 4’s Dispatches.
Prof Graham Medley, who sits on the government’s Sage advisory group of scientists, told the programme he had urged ministers to launch a lockdown immediately at a meeting on March 10.
He said the virus infection rate was doubling every three days by that point. However, Mr Johnson and his top officials declined to act.
‘We already knew that this virus was going to cause an awful lot of death and disability, and would require an awful lot of NHS resource,’ he said.
‘So it was with some dismay we were watching senior politicians behaving in a way that suggested that this was not something that was too serious.’
He also said the government was warned in late February that the virus could kill up to 500,000 people if left unchecked – weeks before a report by Imperial College making the same estimate was made public.
It follows claims top officials did not want a lockdown, and first favoured a ‘herd immunity’ strategy that would see millions of people infected but with the hope that most would survive.
The programme, which airs tonight at 9pm, also heard from Italian health minister Pierpaolo Sileri, who said Mr Johnson told Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte on March 13 he wanted herd immunity in the UK.
The government refused to be interviewed for the programme, which a spokesman described as a ‘rushed documentary which set out to find failings rather than to inform’.
He said: ‘This is an unprecedented global pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it. At every stage, the government has been guided by the advice of experts from Sage and its sub-committees.’