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An critical independent inquiry into the UK's handling to the Covid emergency has found that the response were "too little, too late," declaring how enacting restrictions just a single week before could have prevented over 23,000 deaths.

Key Findings of the Inquiry

Documented in over seven hundred and fifty documents spanning two volumes, the findings depict a clear story showing procrastination, inaction as well as a seeming inability to learn from experience.

The account about the start of the pandemic in early 2020 has been described as especially harsh, calling February as "a lost month."

Government Shortcomings Noted

• It questions why Boris Johnson neglected to chair one gathering of the Cobra response team in that period.
• Action to the pandemic effectively stopped over the school break.
• During the second week in March, the circumstances was described as "little short of catastrophic," due to a lack of plan, insufficient testing and thus little understanding of how far the coronavirus had spread.

Possible Outcome

While acknowledging the fact that the move to implement a lockdown had been unprecedented as well as extremely challenging, taking other action to curb the spread of the virus more quickly might have resulted in such measures may not have been necessary, or been less lengthy.

By the time confinement was necessary, the inquiry authors noted, had it been enforced on 16 March, projections suggested this could have reduced the count of fatalities in England during the initial wave of Covid by nearly 50%, which equals over 20,000 fatalities avoided.

The inability to understand the extent of the risk, or the immediacy of response it required, meant that when the possibility of enforced restrictions was first considered it proved belated and a lockdown became inevitable.

Ongoing Failures

The inquiry also pointed out how several of the same failures – reacting too slowly and downplaying the rate and impact of the pandemic's progression – occurred again later in 2020, as restrictions were lifted and then late reintroduced due to infectious mutations.

The report describes this "unacceptable," noting how officials failed to learn lessons through repeated outbreaks.

Final Count

The United Kingdom endured among the worst Covid crises within Europe, amounting to approximately two hundred forty thousand pandemic deaths.

The inquiry is the second from the public inquiry regarding every element of the response and handling to the coronavirus, which began previously and is due to run into 2027.