On Thursday, March 12, there was a deepened gravity in the prime minister’s voice when, standing in front of two Union Jack flags,
he told the nation: “This is the worst public health crisis for a generation . . . I must level with you, level with the British public — more families, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
Only nine days earlier he had described the virus as a “moderate illness”. But by that Thursday the number of confirmed cases had jumped from 51 on March 3 to 596 and there had been 10 deaths. The contain strategy had not worked and contact tracing was abandoned — as the failure to increase testing capacity during previous weeks made it impossible.
By then it would have been futile anyway because the Imperial and Oxford back-modelling estimates predict by that day 130,000 people had caught the virus. This suggests that the contact testing programme had only picked up 0.5% of the infections when it was finally discarded.
The government had clearly misread the speed of the virus’ acceleration. So the first of the mitigation measures was finally brought in that day when people were told to self-isolate at home if they had symptoms. Just three days before, Whitty had said this measure would be introduced in 10 to 14 days.
Two other measures would also be brought in — the banning of mass gatherings and isolation of whole households if one person had symptoms — but again the government stressed these would be delayed to the “right time” in the future.
Vallance and Whitty explained the staged timing by saying people might tire of such social distancing measures if they were brought in too early and lasted a long time. “If people go too early they become very fatigued. This is going to be a long haul. It is very important we don’t start things in advance of need,” Whitty said.
The newspapers the next morning, Friday the 13th, were withering. “Johnson’s response has not been to lock down entire cities or even the whole country as China, South Korea and Italy have done. He has not ordered the closure of schools, as Ireland and Denmark did yesterday. Nor has he ordered the cancellation of large public events, as France and even Scotland has done,” complained
The Times leader.
“Instead, his response was to announce that Britain would stop testing all but those exhibiting the most severe symptoms of the virus . . . This is a remarkable gamble by Mr Johnson, albeit one that the government insists is informed by science.”
That morning Vallance went on Radio 4’s
Today programme and dug an even deeper hole for his colleagues by mentioning the phrase the spin doctors did not want the public to hear. The government’s aim, he said, was to suppress the virus but not completely and “to build up some degree of herd immunity” while protecting the vulnerable. Later, on Sky News, he said that herd immunity would require 60% of the population to contract the virus.
That would be 40 million people — of whom 1% were likely to die, based on events in China and Italy. It was quite a gamble as it had not yet even been established whether people would develop long-running antibody resistance after contracting the virus.
The solution
The days were ticking by quickly. Despite repeated assertions by the government it was following the scientific advice, there was increasing concern among its two university modelling teams that their warnings were not being heeded that the death toll would still be horrendous even if the mitigation measures were introduced.
They took matters into their own hands and, without being commissioned to do so, began crunching the numbers on a lockdown from their campuses in London. The first results were contained in a LSHTM study — co-authored by Edmunds and his colleague Nicholas Davies. This was communicated to the government’s advisory modelling committee on Wednesday, March 11, according to Davies. Modellers at Edinburgh University, led by Professor Mark Woolhouse, confirmed the findings.
The report advised that the death rate could be drastically cut with more severe measures to suppress the virus. It predicted that intermittent periods of intensive lockdown-type measures would prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.
Ferguson and his team at Imperial drew similar conclusions that week in an equally devastating report. The early results of that work were discussed in Sage that week and provided to the government that weekend. A draft was also sent to the White House as it predicted up to 1.2 million deaths in America under a mitigation strategy.
The team estimated that the number of UK deaths could be cut to about 30,000 with a series of lockdowns over a two-year period, whereas the government’s preferred mitigation measures could allow hundreds of thousands of deaths. The two reports were the beginning of the end for the government’s strategy.
World closes down
The world was closing down by Saturday, March 14. France said it was shutting non-essential public locations, Spain went into lockdown that evening, America had announced a ban on flights from the UK and the Italians were already holding impromptu concerts from their balconies after the whole country had been confined to their homes since Tuesday.
In the UK many people had given up waiting for the government to take action and were already taking matters into their own hands. Firms were encouraging employees to work from home, and suddenly that Saturday’s sporting fixture list was looking threadbare as the leagues cancelled games of their own volition despite the huge losses in revenues.
The government’s strategy was in shreds: ripped apart by its own modelling scientists and looking creepily Darwinian after the unfortunate introduction of the words “herd immunity”. More than 200 scientists and academics signed a letter condemning the delay policy and saying thousands of lives could be saved by introducing stricter social distancing measures immediately.
These were the problems confronting Johnson when he summoned a meeting of his inner team at 9.15am that Saturday morning. By then it is understood that his most influential adviser Cummings had gone through a “Domoscene conversion” to being a strong advocate of the kind of suppression strategy that would lead to lockdown.
A source who attended Cobra meetings at the time said: “The libertarian in Boris didn’t want lockdown.” However, Johnson is said to have been won over at the meeting because of the seriousness of the threat, and a decision was made in principle to lock down Britain. He told those around him “we need to be taking all measures necessary”.
But the key issues of how and when to introduce a lockdown would not be resolved for another nine days. A senior Tory source said Johnson “bottled” lockdown during the following week because of concerns about the economy.
The failure to seize the initiative and go into lockdown at that point was a decision that cost many lives. After deliberating over the weekend, the government waited until the evening of Monday March 16 to introduce a package of advisory measures. People were told to work from home if possible, avoid pubs and restaurants and self-isolate at home if someone in their household was ill.
Even scientists on the government’s own advisory committees were alarmed by the delays in introducing more stringent measures. Professor Peter Openshaw, a member of the government’s Nervtag (new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group) committee said: “Many of us on the scientific advisory committees were quite keen that action should be taken a couple of weeks before action actually was taken.”
“I think that critical period of delay made the big difference to the peak numbers, both of hospitalisations and of deaths. I think everyone would accept now in retrospect that if we’d gone for lockdown a couple of weeks earlier that would have greatly reduced the numbers of hospitalisations and deaths.”
Every day was vital now as the UK already had an estimated 320,000 infections on March 16, according to the Imperial and Oxford back-dated modelling, and it would double again almost every three days despite the advisory measures which were introduced.
Final days to lockdown
The final week before lockdown was played out in slow motion. There had been a fundamental pivot in government policy towards more draconian actions but the prime minister is said to have still been uncomfortable with the the idea of a full legally enforced shutdown which many of his advisers now saw as an unfortunate necessity.
It was to be a week of more delays and more drip feed measures. The big announcement on Wednesday was that finally schools would be closed indefinitely but that would not take place until Friday afternoon.
The measures to close cafés, pubs, bars, clubs, restaurants, gyms, leisure centres, nightclubs, theatres and cinemas would not take effect until midnight that evening. Isolation to protect the 1.5 million people identified as extremely vulnerable as a result of existing conditions would not be announced until Sunday, March 22.
While many people were already working from home and starting to stand their distance from others in social situations, there were reports that many commuter buses and trains were still packed in central London, which had more than a third of known cases. Google data tracking people’s movements suggests the use of public transport was down by only a third across the UK by Wednesday March 18. It was clear not everyone was following the government’s advice.
Having backed the government’s earlier strategy, Cummings was said to now be convinced it wouldn’t work and was advocating a lockdown, starting with restricting traffic in and out of London. Military chiefs are said to have been put on notice that their troops might be needed to enforce a lockdown in the capital starting at midnight on Saturday.
A government insider said the prime minister looked “haunted” as he wrestled with the big decision of what to do next. His attempts at jollity had backfired at the beginning of the week when he described the effort to equip the NHS with more ventilators to meet the coming blizzard of respiratory illnesses as “operation last gasp”.
The gearing up of the NHS had one particularly ill-thought-out and reckless consequence. On Thursday, March 19, the health department announced 15,000 people should be discharged from hospitals into the community and care homes to free up beds for coronavirus patients. This was without a mandatory requirement that they be tested for the virus.
On Friday, March 20, Dr Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, reassured the country that there was a “perfectly adequate supply of PPE [personal protective equipment] for care workers and any supply pressures have been “completely resolved.” The lack of PPE and the failure to protect the elderly in care homes would shortly become the next national scandal to haunt the government and expose its lack of planning since January.
At the Downing Street press conference, Harries advised people to stay two metres apart during walks while standing at a lectern less than a metre from the prime minister.
By that day, the number of infections had doubled during the midweek to an estimated 790,000, according to the Imperial and Oxford data. Despite the growing dangers, many people popped out for a last drink before the pubs shut overnight.
The clement spring weather that weekend brought thousands of people out into parks and open spaces in the new world where they could no longer congregate in sports clubs, pubs or restaurants.
Johnson skipped the daily press briefing on Saturday, March 21 and took a break with his fiancée Carrie Symonds in the prime minister’s second home at Chequers. He returned the following day to host a press conference where he made the same mistake as Harries — standing a metre away from his colleagues while imploring the nation to stay two metres apart.
Inside Downing Street there was a growing realisation Britain was now on a trajectory to be “Italy, at least” in terms of cases and fatalities, according to a source advising the top team. The final straws were the crowds out in the fresh air on Mothering Sunday and the still considerable commuter traffic on Monday morning with half of workers still travelling to their offices. Johnson was forced to finally announce the lockdown that evening.
When the new measures came in on the evening of Monday, March 23, the infections had almost doubled again since the previous Friday and there were an estimated 1.5 million across the UK, according to Imperial and Oxford’s new data. Close to 1.2 million of those infections had happened since Johnson resisted calls to lockdown on Monday March 16.
An analysis of the data shows the lockdown swiftly reduced the spread of the virus but was introduced so late that Britain had a higher number of infections than every other major European country at the time they took the same emergency measures. For example, Italy had an estimated 1.2 million at its lockdown on March 10 and Germany, which locked down a day earlier than than the UK on March 22, is estimated to have had just 270,000 infections.
Sir David King said the lockdown delay was “grossly negligent”. “The fact they were short of PPE, the fact they were short of testing equipment. The response of the government has not just been tardy. It has been totally disrespectful of British lives,” he said. “We created an unmanageable situation.”
There had been too much delay. The sheer number of people who had been allowed to become infected meant the country was riddled with the virus and the only defence was the workers of the NHS who had been left critically short of testing and protective equipment.
To date, 36,675 people in Britain have been confirmed as having died from the virus, including more than 300 NHS staff and care workers. Within four days of lockdown the infection had found its way to the very top of government when the prime minister himself tested positive for the coronavirus.
Last night a government spokesperson said: “Our strategy has been designed at all times to protect our NHS and save lives. Our response has ensured that the NHS can provide the best care possible for people who become ill, enabled hospitals to maintain essential services and ensured ongoing support for people ill in the community.
“It has been vital through this global pandemic to make interventions which the public can feasibly adopt in sufficient numbers over long periods. The Government has been very clear that herd immunity has never been our policy or goal.”
March 2nd: 2,405 estimated daily new infections
Boris Johnson says the UK is “very, very well prepared” after chairing his first Cobra meeting on the coronavirus
March 3rd: 3,069 estimated daily new infections
Top scientific modellers warn the government that up to 250,000 people may die without drastic action to stop the virus spreading
March 4th: 3,917 estimated daily new infections
Officials announce the biggest one-day leap in confirmed Covid-19 cases to 87
March 5th: 5,002 estimated daily new infections
Johnson appears on ITV’s
This Morning, ignoring scientific advice by shaking hands with Phillip Schofield. First UK death announced
March 6th: 6,388 estimated daily new infections
Nadine Dorries, the health minister, goes into self-isolation after being struck with Covid-19 symptoms
March 7th: 8,162 estimated daily new infections
Ireland cancels its Six Nations rugby match with Italy in Dublin, but Johnson attends the England v Wales match at Twickenham
March 8th 10,430 estimated daily new infections
France bans gatherings of more than 1,000 people. However, French rugby fans travel to Edinburgh to watch their team play Scotland
March 9th: 13,333 estimated daily new infections
Ireland bans St Patrick’s Day parades. Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, claims mass gatherings “actually don’t make much difference” to the spread of the disease
March 10th: 17,049 estimated daily new infections
60,000 punters attend the opening day of the four-day Cheltenham horse-racing festival. Italy, meanwhile, goes into lockdown
March 11th: 21,805 estimated daily new infections
3,000 football fans from Spain — where matches are being played behind closed doors — travel to Anfield to watch Liverpool v Atlético Madrid in the Champions League
March 12th: 26,661 estimated daily new infections
With 10 UK deaths so far, Johnson admits this is “the worst public health crisis for a generation . . . many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time”
March 13th: 34,012 estimated daily new infections
Vallance tells broadcasters that the government’s strategy had in part been to “build up some degree of herd immunity”
March 14th: 43,204 estimated daily new infections
France and Spain announce draconian restrictions on public movements. Johnson’s team also begins to consider tougher measures
March 15th: 54,774 estimated daily new infections
Ireland orders all pubs, bars and hotels to close. In Cardiff, the Stereophonics play to a packed arena for the second night in a row
March 16th: 64,498 estimated daily new infections
The prime minister advises Britons to work from home if possible, avoid restaurants and bars, and to self-isolate if someone in their home is ill
March 17th: 81,336 estimated daily new infections
Vallance tells MPs that if deaths can be limited to 20,000 or under it would be “a good outcome”
March 18th: 101, 854 estimated daily new infections
The government announces the indefinite closure of all schools in two days’ time
March 19th: 127,110 estimated daily new infections
Hospitals are told to discharge patients to care homes and into the community to free up NHS beds. No mandatory virus testing is required
March 20th: 158,423 estimated daily new infections
All pubs, restaurants, cinemas and gyms are ordered to shut by midnight
March 21st: 187,055 estimated daily new infections
Johnson visits his Chequers retreat with partner Carrie Symonds as the estimated number of infections edges to one million
March 22nd: 232,156 estimated daily new infections
1.5 million of the country’s most vulnerable people are told to self-isolate for at least three months to protect themselves
March 23rd: 286,528 estimated daily new infections
Johnson finally goes on air to announce a full UK lockdown