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An harsh independent inquiry concerning the UK's management to the coronavirus crisis has concluded which the reaction were "too little, too late," declaring how enacting confinement measures just one week before could have spared more than 20,000 fatalities.

Key Findings of the Investigation

Detailed across over 750 pages spanning two volumes, the findings depict a consistent story of procrastination, lack of action as well as an evident inability to absorb lessons.

The description concerning the onset of the coronavirus in early 2020 is portrayed as particularly critical, labeling February as being "a month of inaction."

Government Failures Emphasized

• The report questions why Boris Johnson failed to chair one meeting of the Cobra response team that month.
• Measures to Covid essentially paused throughout the mid-term vacation.
• In the second week of March, the circumstances had become "nearly calamitous," with a lack of preparation, insufficient testing and thus no understanding about how far Covid was spreading.

What Could Have Been

Although acknowledging the fact that the choice to implement restrictions proved to be unprecedented as well as exceptionally hard, enacting additional measures to curb the spread of coronavirus sooner would have allowed such measures might have been avoided, or alternatively proved shorter.

Once a lockdown became unavoidable, the inquiry authors noted, if implemented enforced a week earlier, modelling indicated that would have reduced the number of fatalities across England in the first wave of the virus by nearly 50%, representing 23,000 lives saved.

The failure to recognize the magnitude of the risk, and the need for measures it required, resulted in that once the option of enforced restrictions was first considered it had become too delayed and such measures became unavoidable.

Ongoing Failures

The inquiry further highlighted how many similar errors – reacting with delay and underestimating the speed together with consequences of the virus's transmission – were then repeated subsequently in 2020, as controls were removed and then delayed reimposed in the face of infectious variants.

The report labels such repetition "unacceptable," adding how the government failed to improve through successive waves.

Final Count

The United Kingdom endured one of the most severe Covid outbreaks in Europe, with about two hundred forty thousand pandemic lives lost.

This investigation represents the second by the national investigation covering each part of the handling as well as response of the pandemic, that started in previous years and is due to continue until 2027.