(Raaisha upadhyay, Intern journalist)
Boris Johnson has conceded there were “things we could have done differently” over Covid-19, and admitted the government did not understand the virus in the “first few weeks and months”.
In a interview, the prime minister repeatedly refused to discuss any lessons that could be learned before a possible second wave of Covid-19 this winter, saying it was not the moment to “run a kind of inquiry into what happened in the past”.
But Johnson admitted there were “very open questions” about whether the lockdown had started too late.
Johnson said “the single thing that we didn’t see at the beginning” was the extent to which coronavirus could be transmitted symptomatically between people, meaning it had spread further than believed in the UK before the lockdown was imposed.
Several of the government’s own scientific advisers have said the lockdown came too late. Prof John Edmunds, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said in June the decision “cost a lot of lives”.
PM rejected the idea that changes in policy over lockdown, mask use and mass testing meant the government response could, as Edmunds said, be portrayed as “a story of delay that sadly cost lives”. The UK went into lockdown at the end of March.
“If you look at the timing of every single piece of advice that we got from our advisers, from Sage, you will find that whenever they said that we needed to take a particular step, actually, we stuck to that advice like glue,” Johnson said.
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