The real reason Britain failed on coronavirus

The joint health and science super-committee’s report into ‘lessons learned’ on the UK’s coronavirus response may not want to ‘point fingers of blame’ for the grotesque failures, but my goodness it leaves the reader angry and upset.

It confirms so much that we knew anyway, namely:

1) The early consensus among ministers, officials and scientists was that ‘herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome’.

2) That this led to lockdown being delayed, at a cost of thousands of lives.

3) That there was a ‘serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach to stopping the spread of the virus as adopted by many East and South East Asian countries’.

4) That there was ‘groupthink’ among official scientific advisers and the government which meant ‘we were not as open to approaches being taken elsewhere as we should have been’.

To be clear, the success of countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and China in limiting the spread of the virus through strict isolation of those infected and prohibitions on travel was conspicuous as early as February 2020.