Bericht des House of Commons, 12.10.2021 (engl. Originalfassung)
Much of the impact of covid-19 during the first wave was determined by decisions made during the early weeks of the pandemic, between January and late March 2020. The seriousness of the threat to the UK was recognised in January when the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies—SAGE—was convened and met on 22 January 2020. It is important to record that all decisions taken during those initial weeks were taken in a fog of uncertainty. The UK did not know to what extent covid-19 had entered the country, how many people it was affecting, how quickly it would spread, and what would be the consequences in terms of illness and death. What the UK did know was bleak: from the experience of China and Italy, it was clear that covid-19 was a highly infectious virus, with profound consequences for health, and for which there was no cure nor effective treatments. This meant that the only tools available to affect the spread of the pandemic were isolating people who had contracted the virus and their contacts, and, more generally restricting contacts between people, collectively known as non-pharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs.
The veil of ignorance through which the UK viewed the initial weeks of the pandemic was partly self-inflicted. As we examine in depth in Chapter 4, the UK failed to turn an early lead in developing a test for covid in January 2020 into a testing operation that was adequate for the needs of the country—depriving scientists and policymakers of crucial granular data. Our Committees heard that the UK did not take enough advantage of the
learning and experience being generated in other countries, notably in East Asia. The approach the UK took was particular, and in some respects exceptional.
The initial UK policy was to take a gradual and incremental approach to introducing non-pharmaceutical interventions. A comprehensive lockdown was not ordered until 23 March 2020—two months after SAGE first met to consider the national response to covid-19. This slow and gradualist approach was not inadvertent, nor did it reflect bureaucratic delay or disagreement between Ministers and their advisers. It was a deliberate policy—proposed by official scientific advisers and adopted by the Governments of all of the nations of the United Kingdom. It is now clear that this was the wrong policy, and that it led to a higher initial death toll than would have resulted from a more emphatic early policy. In a pandemic spreading rapidly and exponentially every week counted. The former SAGE participant Professor Neil Ferguson told the Science and Technology Committee that if the national lockdown had been instituted even a week earlier “we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half ”.
As a result, 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. This happened despite the UK counting on some of the best expertise available anywhere in the world, and despite having an open, democratic system that allowed plentiful challenge. Painful though it is, the UK must learn what lessons it can of why this happened if we are to ensure it is not repeated.
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