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A harsh government inquiry into the United Kingdom's response of the pandemic situation has found that the actions was "insufficient and delayed," declaring how enacting restrictions only one week earlier could have spared more than 20,000 fatalities.

Primary Results from the Inquiry

Outlined across over seven hundred and fifty sections spanning two parts, the findings paint a clear story showing procrastination, lack of action and a seeming incapacity to learn from mistakes.

The account about the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 is particularly harsh, labeling February as "a month of inaction."

Government Failures Highlighted

• It questions the reasons why the then prime minister failed to chair one gathering of the Cobra response team during February.
• Measures to the pandemic essentially paused throughout the mid-term vacation.
• By the second week in March, the state of affairs was described as "nearly calamitous," due to inadequate strategy, no testing and consequently no clear picture about the extent to which the virus had spread.

Potential Impact

While recognizing that the move to enforce a lockdown proved to be without precedent and exceptionally hard, taking additional measures to reduce the spread of the virus earlier might have resulted in a lockdown may not have been necessary, or have been of shorter duration.

By the time confinement was inevitable, the investigation went on, had it been imposed a week earlier, projections suggested this could have cut the total of deaths across England in the earliest phase of the pandemic by around half, which equals twenty-three thousand fatalities avoided.

The omission to understand the scale of the threat, and the urgency for action it required, led to the fact that when the option of a mandatory lockdown was initially contemplated it had become belated so that restrictions had become necessary.

Ongoing Failures

The inquiry further pointed out that several similar mistakes – reacting too slowly as well as minimizing the rate and effect of Covid’s spread – were then repeated later in 2020, as restrictions were eased and subsequently late reintroduced in the face of spreading variants.

The report describes this "unacceptable," adding how the government failed to learn lessons over multiple outbreaks.

Total Impact

The United Kingdom endured one of the deadliest Covid outbreaks in Europe, amounting to around two hundred forty thousand pandemic deaths.

This investigation constitutes the latest by the national investigation into each part of the handling as well as handling to the coronavirus, which began two years ago and is due to run into 2027.