"We were learning about it as we went through, and of course with hindsight, there's things we know about it now that we didn't know at the time."īereaved families reacted to the parliamentary report with outrage, furious that the people who died of COVID-19 received scant mention in the 150-page document. "It was an unprecedented pandemic,″ Cabinet minister Stephen Barclay told Sky News. Credit: AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, Pool The British government waited too long to impose a lockdown in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, missing a chance to contain the disease and leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, lawmakers concluded Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2021 file photo, critical Care staff prone a COVID-19 patient on the Christine Brown ward at King's College Hospital in London. has recorded more than 137,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest toll in Europe after Russia.īut government officials said they did what they could with the information they had in a time of crisis.
performed "significantly worse" than many other countries during the initial period of the pandemic. Lawmakers said their inquiry was designed to uncover why the U.K. must learn what lessons it can of why this happened if we are to ensure it is not repeated.'' "Decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic - and the advice that led to them - rank as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced,'' states the joint report from the House of Commons' science and health committees. It was only when Britain's National Health Service risked being overwhelmed by rapidly rising infections that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative government finally ordered a lockdown. The deadly delay derived from the failure of British government ministers to question the recommendations of scientific advisers, resulting in a dangerous level of "groupthink" that caused them to dismiss the more aggressive strategies adopted in East and Southeast Asia to limit infections, the report said.