🔗 Share this article Lockdown One Week Sooner Would Have Prevented Over 20,000 Deaths, Covid Investigation Concludes A damning government investigation regarding Britain's management of the coronavirus situation has concluded which the reaction were "too little, too late," noting how implementing a lockdown only one week sooner might have prevented more than 20,000 deaths. Key Findings of the Investigation Detailed in over seven hundred fifty pages spanning two volumes, the results depict an unmistakable story of delay, inaction as well as an evident incapacity to absorb lessons. The account about the beginning of Covid-19 in the first months of 2020 has been described as particularly brutal, describing the month of February as "a month of inaction." Ministerial Shortcomings Noted It questions the reasons why the then prime minister did not to chair one gathering of the government's Cobra crisis committee that month. The response to the pandemic essentially stopped throughout the half-term holiday week. By the second week of March, the circumstances was described as "little short of disastrous," due to a lack of preparation, no testing and therefore no understanding regarding how far Covid had spread. Potential Impact While acknowledging that the move to implement a lockdown proved to be without precedent as well as exceptionally hard, implementing further steps to reduce the transmission of the virus more quickly might have resulted in that one may not have been necessary, or at least proved less lengthy. Once confinement was inevitable, the report went on, had it been introduced on March 16, estimates suggested that might have lowered the total of lives lost within England in the earliest phase of the virus by around half, which equals twenty-three thousand fatalities avoided. The inability to appreciate the extent of the risk, and the immediacy for action it demanded, meant that once the option of compulsory confinement was first considered it proved too delayed and such measures were unavoidable. Ongoing Failures The report further noted that a number of of the same errors – reacting too slowly and downplaying the pace and effect of the virus's transmission – were later repeated in the latter part of 2020, as controls were lifted only to be delayed restored in the face of contagious variants. The report labels such repetition "inexcusable," adding how officials were unable to absorb experience during successive waves. Overall Toll The United Kingdom endured one of the deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in Europe, amounting to around two hundred forty thousand virus-related deaths. The inquiry constitutes the second by the national investigation covering all aspects of the response as well as management to the coronavirus, which started two years ago and is scheduled to continue into 2027.