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A damning independent inquiry into the UK's management of the pandemic emergency has concluded that the reaction was "too little, too late," stating how enacting confinement measures just a single week sooner would have prevented more than twenty thousand deaths.

Main Conclusions of the Investigation

Outlined in over seven hundred fifty documents across two volumes, the results depict a consistent story of procrastination, failure to act and a seeming incapacity to absorb from experience.

The account about the start of the pandemic in the first months of 2020 is portrayed as particularly critical, describing February as being "a wasted month."

Ministerial Errors Noted

• It raises questions about why Boris Johnson neglected to chair a single session of the Cobra response team that month.
• Measures to the pandemic effectively halted during the school break.
• During the second week of March, the circumstances was "little short of calamitous," due to no proper preparation, no testing and thus little understanding about how far the virus had circulated.

What Could Have Been

While acknowledging that the choice to impose restrictions had been historic as well as exceptionally hard, taking additional measures to slow the circulation of the virus earlier would have allowed that one may not have been necessary, or at least proved of shorter duration.

By the time confinement was inevitable, the report noted, had it been introduced a week earlier, modelling showed this might have reduced the total of lives lost within England during the initial wave of the virus by around half, which equals over 20,000 lives saved.

The inability to recognize the magnitude of the threat, and the immediacy of response it demanded, meant the fact that by the time the chance of a mandatory lockdown was first discussed it had become belated so that a lockdown were unavoidable.

Ongoing Failures

The inquiry further pointed out that many of these errors – responding with delay and minimizing the rate together with impact of the pandemic's progression – were then repeated later in 2020, as controls were lifted and subsequently belatedly reintroduced due to spreading mutations.

The report labels this "inexcusable," adding that the government did not to absorb experience through multiple phases.

Total Impact

The UK endured among the most severe coronavirus outbreaks in Europe, recording around two hundred forty thousand pandemic fatalities.

This investigation is the latest by the ongoing investigation into all aspects of the handling as well as response to the coronavirus, which was launched two years ago and is scheduled to run until 2027.