In detail: UK lockdown timing cost lives – scientist
A little more detail now on those comments earlier from Prof John Edmunds, who attends meetings of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
He said lives would have been saved had ministers acted sooner to put the country into lockdown.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced strict curbs on daily life on 23 March, when there were an estimated 100,000 new infections every day in England.
But Prof Edmunds told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show: “We should have gone into lockdown earlier.”
He said it would have been “hard to do it” as the data ministers had in the early part of March and “our kind of situational awareness” was “really quite poor”.
“I think it would have been very hard to pull the trigger at that point but I wish we had – I wish we had gone into lockdown earlier. I think that has cost a lot of lives unfortunately.”
Some 40,465 people have died with the virus in the UK, according to the latest government figures.
Prof Edmunds said the epidemic “is definitely not all over” – warning there is an “awful long way to go”.
But Health Secretary Matt Hancock has insisted No 10 made the “right decisions at the right time” and had been guided by a “balance” of scientific opinions on the issue.
Asked if he was sure that the timing of the lockdown had not cost lives, he said: “I am sure, as I keep looking back on that period, I’m sure that taking into account everything we knew at that moment – my view is that we made the right decisions at the right time.”
