Introducing lockdown measures a week earlier could have halved the UK's coronavirus deaths a former Government adviser has said.
Professor Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, has told the Science and Technology Committee that introducing lockdown measures just a short time earlier could have halved the country's death toll which is currently at more than 40,000.
He said: "The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced.
"So, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half."
However, Prof Ferguson, who originally estimated that UK deaths would be unlikely to exceed 20,000, did add that based on what was known about transmission and fatalities at the time, the measures were warranted.
The UK was put into lockdown on March 23 which saw people encouraged to stay home and only leave the house for a limited number of reasons in a bid to stop the spread of coronavirus.
But Prof Ferguson also said that up to 2,000 coronavirus infections had been imported from Italy and Spain before lockdown.
He said: "Around about that time just before lockdown happened, the first two weeks of March, we probably had around 1,500 to 2,000 infections imported from Italy and Spain which we just hadn't seen in the surveillance data."
