🔴Britain did not lock down sooner because ministers failed to challenge poor scientific advice, the first major report into the Government’s pandemic response has concluded.
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telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/1…
➡️The report says the error led to "one of most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced" and resulted in a higher death toll.
It highlights a series of errors which are likely to have cost thousands of lives
✖️A lack of early testing left Britain "facing the biggest health crisis in 100 years with virtually no data to analyse."
"The UK was reduced to understanding the spread by waiting for people to be so sick that they needed to be admitted to hospital"
Unaware of the true scale of spread, ministers and scientists adopted a "fatalistic" approach of trying to manage Covid-19, rather than stop it.
⚠️This "amounted in practice" to accepting herd immunity through infection, the report concluded
The lack of testing was particularly damaging for care homes.
Between March 2020 and April 30 2021, more than 41,000 care home residents died of Covid, nearly a quarter of all deaths
✈️Meanwhile, a failure to shut borders allowed an influx of new cases.
A study by Imperial College found that 33% of cases during the first wave were introduced from Spain and 29% were introduced from France
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/1…
Britain’s pandemic planning was also too heavily based on influenza, and had failed to incorporate lessons from outbreaks of Sars, Mers and Ebola.
➡️The 2019 National Risk Register concluded an emerging virus would lead to a maximum of 100 deaths
However, the most successful part of Britain’s Covid-19 response was the vaccine programme💉
It is estimated to have saved 112,000 lives in England alone and protected nearly 50 million people in the UK
✍️"The success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response such as the test and trace system."
Read the full analysis 👇
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/1…
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