The coronavirus death toll in the UK would have been reduced by at least half if lockdown measures were introduced a week earlier, a former Government adviser has said.
Epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson told the Science and Technology Committee: “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 death toll by at least a half.”
However, he said that based on what was known about transmission and fatalities at the time, the measures were warranted.
Prof Ferguson, who originally estimated that UK deaths would unlikely exceed 20,000, was asked what had “gone wrong” as the Government count reached nearly 41,000.
He said 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.”
The UK was put into lockdown on March 23 in an unprecedented move to try and stop the spread of coronavirus.
Prof Ferguson said when the forecasts were made at the beginning of March they thought there were fewer cases in the country than there really was.
He added: “We tried very hard to estimate what proportion of cases have been missed, obviously at the time we had a policy of trying to screen people at borders.
"We estimated then that maybe two-thirds of imported cases had been missed.
“What we now know - because the epidemics had taken off in Italy and Spain - the point at which we realised was probably 90 per cent of cases imported to this country were missed by those border measures because we weren’t even checking people.”
