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An harsh government investigation into Britain's response to the pandemic situation has found that the response were "insufficient and delayed," declaring that implementing a lockdown only a single week sooner would have prevented in excess of 23,000 lives.

Main Conclusions of the Investigation

Detailed through more than seven hundred fifty sections across two reports, the conclusions depict a consistent picture showing delay, inaction as well as an apparent incapacity to learn lessons.

The account about the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020 is portrayed as especially critical, calling the month of February as being "a lost month."

Official Failures Emphasized

• It raises questions about why the UK leader did not to chair a single gathering of the Cobra crisis committee that month.
• Action to the pandemic effectively halted throughout the mid-term vacation.
• During the second week of March, the situation was described as "little short of calamitous," due to a lack of strategy, a lack of testing and therefore no clear picture about how far the coronavirus was spreading.

What Could Have Been

Even though acknowledging the fact that the move to implement confinement was without precedent as well as hugely difficult, implementing further steps to curb the circulation of coronavirus earlier could have meant such measures might have been avoided, or alternatively been shorter.

By the time a lockdown became unavoidable, the investigation stated, had it been imposed on 16 March, modelling suggested this might have cut the count of deaths across England in the first wave of Covid by around half, representing over 20,000 lives saved.

The failure to recognize the scale of the risk, or the need for measures it necessitated, led to that once the chance of compulsory confinement was first discussed it was already too late so that restrictions had become necessary.

Repeated Mistakes

The investigation additionally highlighted that a number of similar failures – reacting with delay and minimizing the pace and impact of Covid’s spread – were then repeated later in 2020, when controls were lifted and subsequently delayed reimposed because of infectious new strains.

It calls such repetition "unjustifiable," noting that the government failed to improve over multiple waves.

Overall Toll

The United Kingdom experienced among the worst coronavirus crises within Europe, amounting to around 240,000 virus-related deaths.

This report constitutes the latest by the public inquiry covering each part of the response and handling to the coronavirus, which began in previous years and is scheduled to continue until 2027.