‘Too little, too late’: damning report condemns UK’s Covid response | Covid inquiry

A damning official report into the handling of the pandemic concluded the UK’s response to Covid was “too little, too late” and said even starting the lockdown a week earlier could have saved more than 20,000 lives.

The document also includes harsh criticism of what Boris Johnson described as a “toxic and chaotic” culture in Downing Street (which the then prime minister is said to have actively embraced) where the loudest voices dominated and women were sidelined.

Detailed over more than 750 pages across two volumes, the findings of the second part of the Covid inquiry hearings into the government’s handling of the pandemic paint a coherent picture of delay, inaction and an apparent inability to learn lessons.

The narrative that the pandemic began in early 2020 is particularly grim, describing February as a “lost month.” He questions why Johnson failed to chair a single meeting of the Cobra emergency committee that month, and also notes that the response to Covid essentially stalled during the half term week.

While he acknowledges that the decision to impose a lockdown was unprecedented and extremely difficult, he says taking other measures to curb the spread of the virus could have meant it could have been avoided sooner, or at least lasted shorter.

The inquiry authors say that if a lockdown had been imposed on March 16, a week before it happened, modeling showed it could have almost halved the number of deaths in the first wave of the virus in England, meaning 23,000 lives could have been saved.

Perhaps the harshest criticism was directed at Johnson and his team, especially No. Although directed at his then adviser Dominic Cummings, described in 10 as central to the “culture of fear”, the report also takes aim at the three devolved governments and others central to the process, such as scientific advisers.

“The investigation concludes that the response of the four governments was repeatedly ‘too little, too late’,” the report said.

“Failure to appreciate the scale of the threat or the urgency of the response it demanded meant that when the possibility of forced isolation was first considered, it was too late and lockdown became inevitable.”

The report notes that many of the same mistakes – reacting too slowly and underestimating the speed and impact of Covid’s spread – were repeated in late 2020, when restrictions were lifted and then belatedly reimposed in the face of new infectious variants, describing it as “inexcusable”.

The first volume of the report gives a chronology of the crisis from the beginning of 2020 to the eventual lifting of restrictions, pointing to a consistent picture of inaction despite growing evidence of a new virus spreading around the world and capable of being transmitted between people.

Events such as the early Covid crisis in Italy “should have spurred urgent planning in the four countries,” the report said, adding: “Instead, governments did not take the outbreak seriously enough until it was too late. February 2020 was a lost month.”

The authors say that while there is nothing to mandate that Cobra will always be led by a Prime Minister, it is “surprising” that Johnson did not do so before March.

“Mr Johnson should have realized earlier that this was an emergency requiring the prime ministerial leadership to add urgency to the response,” concluded the inquiry, chaired by retired judge and disparate judge Heather Hallett.

This was partly explained by the fact that the Prime Minister “acted according to his own optimistic disposition” and accepted assurances that everything necessary was being done. Most of these assurances came from health secretary Matt Hancock, who was described in the report as having a reputation for “over-promising and under-delivering”.

The report says Johnson spent the entire week during the February half-term at the government’s retreat in Chevening, adding: “He does not appear to have been informed in any way or significantly about Covid-19 and was not given any daily updates.”

The report states that as of the second week of March, the situation was “some distance from disaster”, with no proper plan in place, no testing and therefore no understanding of how far the virus had spread.

But the lockdown has still been delayed, partly due to warnings from scientific advisers Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance about the possibility of “behavioral fatigue”, meaning people will only comply for a while. This concept “has no basis in behavioral science and has proven counterproductive given the imperative to act more decisively and sooner,” the report said.

The report says mistakes were repeated even after the lockdown was imposed on March 23, including what it called an “unwise” exit from restrictions that summer, partly at the urging of then-chancellor Rishi Sunak.

As a second wave swept across the UK, a new lockdown was delayed again, with all four UK governments saying restrictions could be relaxed over Christmas, giving people “false hope” as the report puts it.

The second volume of the report takes a thematic approach; Failures in expert advice, public communication and its impact on vulnerable groups are discussed in detail.

Along with the recommendation, the investigation warns that this is occasionally hampered by the somewhat ad hoc nature of the Sage system, while the quality of economic modeling appears to be quite poor.

Regarding communication, while the initial “stay at home” advice was easy to follow, subsequent restrictions, especially localized ones, were noted to be quite difficult to understand.