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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/20/too-little-too-late-damning-report-condemns-uk-covid-response>
"The UK’s response to Covid was “too little, too late”, a damning official
report on the handling of the pandemic has concluded, saying the introduction
of a lockdown even a week earlier than happened could have saved more than
20,000 lives.
The document also has stinging criticism of a “toxic and chaotic” culture
inside Boris Johnson’s Downing Street – which it said the then prime minister
actively embraced.
It was an environment where the loudest voices held sway and women were
sidelined, the report said.
The idea that a lockdown should not have happened in the circumstances was
false, the authors said. Not having one would have caused loss of life “on a
scale that was unconscionable and unacceptable”.
Detailed in more than 750 pages across two volumes, the findings of the second
part of the Covid inquiry’s hearings on how the government handled the pandemic
paint a consistent picture of delay, inaction and an apparent inability to
learn lessons.
The account of the start of the pandemic in early 2020 is particularly brutal,
describing February as “a lost month”. It questions why Johnson did not chair a
single meeting of the Cobra emergency committee, noting also that the response
to Covid essentially halted during the half-term holiday week.
If a lockdown had been imposed on 16 March, a week earlier than took place,
modelling suggests this could have cut the number of deaths in England in the
first wave of the virus by almost half, equating to 23,000 lives saved, the
inquiry authors say."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
