British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government made serious mistakes in its early handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and should have imposed a full lockdown more quickly, a move that would have saved many lives, a parliamentary inquiry found.
In a sharply critical joint report released yesterday, the British parliament’s Health and Social Care and Science and Technology committees said that the UK had adopted a “fatalistic approach” to COVID-19 early last year, failing to learn from East Asian nations that halted the spread of the virus using swift lockdowns and mass testing.
Instead, the UK effectively accepted “that herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome,” the report said.
That decision meant the virus was allowed to spread through the population before lockdown eventually began on March 23 last year, it said.
The British government denies that herd immunity has ever been part of its pandemic strategy, but the lawmakers said: “It is now clear that this was the wrong policy, and that it led to a higher initial death toll than would have resulted from a more emphatic early policy.”
The findings add to pressure on Johnson over his pandemic decisionmaking ahead of a major public inquiry due to start next year.
A spokesman said the government “never shied away from taking quick and decisive action” during the pandemic.
British Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Jonathan Ashworth called the publication a “damning report” documenting “monumental errors.”
The UK’s COVID-19 death toll last year was “significantly worse” than many nations, in particular in comparison to Asian nations closer to where the virus first appeared, the report said.
To date the UK has recorded 138,167 fatalities, the most in western Europe.
Leading epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London told the Science and Technology Committee in June last year that deaths would have been reduced by at least a half if the lockdown had been brought in even one week earlier.
The committees concluded that it was a “serious mistake” to halt widespread testing in March last year — a decision attributed to a lack of capacity. As a result contacts could not be traced and accurately monitoring the spread of the virus across the UK became impossible.
“The UK was reduced to understanding the spread of COVID-19 by waiting for people to be so sick that they needed to be admitted to hospital,” the report said.
Large-scale testing only resumed in mid-May last year.
The test, trace and isolate system — with a budget of ￡37 billion (US$50.2 billion) — was “slow, uncertain and often chaotic” throughout the first year of the pandemic, the committee found, and this “severely hampered” the UK response.
It “ultimately failed” in its objective to prevent future lockdowns, despite its “vast” budget, the report said.
The lawmakers also criticized the decision to allow older people to be discharged from hospitals into care homes in the initial phase of the pandemic without “the rigor shown in places like Germany and Hong Kong.”
“This, combined with untested staff bringing infection into homes from the community, led to many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided,” the report said.
The committee did praise the government for its successes, including early backing for vaccines as a route out of the pandemic, and the UK’s “genuinely world-leading” rollout of COVID-19 treatments.
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