Starting lockdown just three days earlier would have saved 20,000 lives, new research shows.
Scientists claim certain countries were unwilling to take the economic cost of shutting businesses and ordering people to stay home earlier.
Modelling by the University of Exeter Business School calculated that delaying lockdown by three more days would have cost 32,000 more lives.
A delay of 12 days would have seen 200,000 extra deaths linked to Covid-19, they found.
They have calculated a “price of a life” in the impact on lost GDP linked to lockdown for every death avoided.
The price of life in the UK was among the lowest at around £77,000.
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Countries that were quicker to go into lockdown, such as Germany, New Zealand and South Korea, put a price on life of around £1 million.
Lead author Ben Balmford, of the University of Exeter Business School, said: “Price of life estimates are of critical importance given that government intervention has the ability to save life, yet trades off against other goods.
“Comparing across countries those who pursued an early lockdown strategy reveal themselves to be willing to pay a high price to save their citizen’s lives.
“Some countries, those which imposed lockdown relatively late-on in their respective pandemics, were clearly only willing to pay far less.”
It comes after Government modeller Prof Neil Ferguson admitted when giving evidence before MPs that the UK death toll could have been halved if we had locked down a week earlier.
UK deaths of those to have recorded a positive test now stands at more than 46,000.
The UK’s official coronavirus death toll has risen by 89 in the last 24 hours, the latest figures reveal.
A total of 46,299 people have now died of the disease in all settings, including hospitals, care homes and the community, according to the official data.
There have been a further 670 positive cases confirmed by a test in the past 24 hours.
There has been a total of 306,293 cases of coronavirus in the UK as of today.
Last Tuesday saw a death toll of 119 reported by the Department of Health, with Tuesday, July 21 reporting 110. On Tuesday, July 10 there were just 48 recorded.
