How finest to summarise how badly the federal government fumbled the UK response to the COVID pandemic?
Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, selected to spotlight one actually damning statistic: 23,000.
That is the variety of deaths which may have been prevented if Boris Johnson had adopted his friends in Italy, Spain and France by locking down the UK on 16 March 2020 fairly than delaying for an additional week.
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However I’d select one other – and to my thoughts, far better – failure: when, six months later, these in cost did not be taught from that mistake, resulting in a far better lack of lives.
Again in March 2020, the federal government was compelled to make it up as they went alongside.
Mr Johnson was, within the phrases of his advisers, “trolleying” – swerving erratically between doomsday pondering and the necessity to maintain shaking fingers and act like regular.
However the authorities’s scientific advisers, who got a simple experience by Woman Hallett in her abstract, have been trolleying too.
The identical scientists who have been to induce the federal government to lock down had, weeks earlier than, dismissed the concept as unworkable. Suggesting, not with out purpose (if we would been coping with a flu virus maybe), “herd immunity” was the least unhealthy end result.
However by early summer season of 2020, as Woman Hallett highlighted, we knew what we have been coping with.
We would been by means of a lockdown, we knew folks understood learn how to behave, and we knew which susceptible teams wanted essentially the most help.
But as a substitute of performing to gradual the rising unfold of the virus, chaos inside authorities led to hurried insurance policies together with “Eat Out to Help Out” and confused messages about returning to work should you might, though few of us have been in a position to as a result of our workplaces have been shut.
Maybe one of the best evaluation of the state of affairs then got here not from science journalists like me, or political pundits, however comic Matt Lucas, who mocked Boris Johnson’s speech to the nation about coronavirus.
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Then, when scientific recommendation, far clearer and extra thought-about than earlier than, known as for a brief, sharp lockdown over college half time period that autumn, it was rejected.
Then, as instances inevitably rose as winter set in, the complicated and disruptive “tier” system was launched. A sort of lockdown mild that did not actually work.
This led in flip to a precipitous rise in instances, partly pushed by the brand new “Kent” or Alpha variant, which the scientists had seen coming, and the necessity for an additional draconian lockdown in January 2021.
One insider described it to the inquiry as a “roller-coaster” response. Considered one of chaotic, half-baked, half-measures that made extra extreme interventions mandatory.
Indecision price the financial system – and the psychological well being and well-being of essentially the most susceptible – way over shorter, more durable, earlier lockdowns would have carried out.
And finally, most damningly, it price essentially the most lives. The “second wave”, because it quickly turned recognized, between December 2020 and February 2021, killed 65,000 folks. One evaluation concluded 27,000 of these deaths might need been averted, or not less than delayed, had harder motion been taken.
It is why, now that the pandemic is over, an evaluation of the information exhibits how the UK noticed among the highest COVID mortality within the developed world.
It is affordable to query the aim of a prolonged, £200m inquiry, as many, together with my colleagues, have.
Particularly if you solely need to look to lockdown events and the spectacular falling out between Boris Johnson and key advisors, equivalent to Dominic Cummings, to know there was chaos and unhealthy decision-making on the coronary heart of presidency.
Is it value an additional £200m to know that as a lot proof as attainable has been dragged into the sunshine – when you think about the failed “test and trace” programme alone price taxpayers £35bn?
Absolutely it’s value it for the households of the 220,000 who died throughout the UK’s COVID pandemic.
