Lockdowns could have been avoided if the government had responded to the COVID pandemic earlier, the official inquiry concludes today.
It also claimed that 23,000 people killed by the virus could have been saved if a national shutdown had been imposed just one week earlier, while adding that the first lockdown of March 2020 may have been unneccessary with quicker action.
Whitehall was so badly prepared for the devastating virus that ministers were forced to take ‘tough decisions’ which amounted to ‘too little, too late’, announced Baroness Hallett, chair of the Covid-19 Inquiry.
She also concluded the repeated lockdowns left ‘lasting scars on society and the economy’, brought ordinary childhood to a halt and delayed the diagnosis and treatment of other health issues.
She condemned failures by key scientists and senior civil servants, the ‘toxic’ and ‘destabilising’ effects of No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings, and dithering ministers both in London and the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They had failed to appreciate the ‘serious and immediate threat’ posed by rampaging coronavirus in the first three months of 2020.
In her damning second report, Lady Hallett concludes the first lockdown which started on March 23, 2020, ‘might have been shorter or not necessary at all’ if restrictions such as self-isolating and social distancing had been brought in sooner – even by just a week.
She wrote: ‘Had a mandatory lockdown been imposed on or immediately after 16 March 2020, modelling shows that in England alone there would have been approximately 23,000 fewer deaths in the first wave’. The death toll in this period ‘would have been reduced by 48 per cent’, she said.
Among her 760-page report’s damning findings, she found:
- Boris Johnson was too slow and ‘should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership’
- Sir Christopher Wormald – now running the civil service for Sir Keir Starmer – presided over ‘misleading assurances’ when he was in charge of the health department about the UK being prepared
- He also failed to correct ‘overenthusiastic’ Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s false promises to 10 Downing Street about having the crisis under control.
- The vast majority of children were not at risk of serious direct harm from Covid-19, ‘but suffered greatly from the closure of schools and requirement to stay at home’.
- Children ‘were not always prioritised’ and the government was not prepared for the ‘sudden and enormous task’ of educating children at home.
Paramedics take a patient into St Thomas’s Hospital in London during the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020
A near deserted Piccadilly Circus, London, during England’s third national lockdown in January 2021
Lady Hallett said by the time a mandatory lockdown was being considered ‘it was already too late’, adding it had ‘only became inevitable because of the acts and omissions of the four governments’.
The peer and former Appeal Court judge said politicians had made decisions ‘in conditions of extreme pressure’ but ‘nonetheless, I can summarise my findings of the response as “too little, too late”.’
Covid was the most momentous event in UK history since the Second World War, with millions ordered to stay at home, with a devastating effect on schoolchildren and billions of pounds spent propping up the economy, during the series of shutdowns.
Lady Hallett concluded: ‘Had the UK been better prepared, fewer lives would have been lost, the socio-economic costs would have been substantially reduced and some of the decisions politicians had to take would have been far more straightforward.’
She said: ‘While the nationwide lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 undoubtedly saved lives, they also left lasting scars on society and the economy, brought ordinary childhood to a halt, delayed the diagnosis and treatment of other health issues and exacerbated societal inequalities.’
The inquiry chair blasted officials and politicians for their glacial reactions as the deadly disease spread from China in January 2020, to Thailand and South Korea and then Italy. She described February that year as ‘a lost month’ in which the UK could have made preparations that would have saved tens of thousands of lives.
The overall lack of urgency overall in government was ‘inexcusable’.
Baroness Hallett, the chair of the Covid Inquiry, who published her damning second report on the pandemic on Thursday
Then Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and then Health Secretary Matt Hancock arrive at number 10 Downing Street on March 17, 2020, a week before the first lockdown
She observed that Mr Cummings had blamed the Cabinet Office and Health Department who ‘weren’t banging alarm bells at this point. Far from it, they were going skiing.’
Lady Hallett said: ‘None of governments in the UK had adequately prepared for the challenges and risks of a national lockdown.’
Later, when the second lockdown approached, she criticised Mr Johnson who ‘throughout September and October 2020, repeatedly changed his mind on whether to introduce tougher restrictions and failed to make timely decisions’.
She said the ‘weakness of the restrictions used and Mr Johnson’s oscillation enabled the virus to continue spreading at pace’. Mr Cummings has described Mr Johnson as ‘bouncing back and forth’ in March 2020 on the issue of whether to implement stringent restrictions.
Lady Hallett said: ‘Mr Johnson’s own failure to appreciate the urgency of the situation was due to his optimism that it would amount to nothing, his scepticism arising from earlier UK experiences of infectious diseases, and, inevitably, his attention being on other government priorities.
‘This was compounded by the misleading assurances he received from the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and Social Care that pandemic planning was robust.’
However she also pointed out that the scientific advice in early March 2020, from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) including chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty, was that the government should not introduce restrictions too early, before the virus had taken hold, to avoid the public suffering ‘fatigue’.
And the inquiry chairman had harsh words for Mr Cummings. She said she had received ‘cogent evidence’ that the PM’s most senior adviser had many good qualities but had also ‘materially contributed to the toxic and sexist workplace culture at the heart of the UK government’, including using ‘offensive, sexualised and misogynistic language’.
Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, pictured, centre, with Mr Whitty, left, and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, right, speaking during a press conference in March 2020
She branded him ‘a destabilising influence’ during a time of crisis who had ‘poisoned the atmosphere in 10 Downing Street and undermined the authority of the prime minister’.
Lady Hallett praised the fact that the UK was the first country in the world to approve a vaccine, in December 2020, as ‘a remarkable achievement and a decisive turning point in the pandemic’.
Mr Johnson had ‘acknowledged that a second lockdown would be a disaster’, said Lady Hallett, but the inquiry heard there was ‘no meaningful model’ of the devastating costs to the economy of a national shutdown.
The Covid-19 Inquiry is split into modules and this was the conclusions of module two, in which 166 witnesses gave oral evidence over nine weeks of public hearings in 2023 and 2024.