Professor Neil Ferguson, whose projection models for the spread of the virus played a key role in helping to formulate the government’s response, made the comments during a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee briefing.
He said: “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 then reduced the final death toll by at least a half”, Ferguson said.
“Whilst I think the measures, given what we knew about this virus then in terms of its transmission and its lethality, were warranted - I wouldn’t second-guess them at this point - certainly had we introduced them earlier, we would have seen many fewer deaths.”
Professor Ferguson said he agreed with the decisions taken by the government, but questioned whether they were taken at the right time.
The U.K. currently has the second highest death toll from COVID-19 in the world, behind only the U.S.
When Professor Ferguson was asked what went wrong he said:“I think two things - one is a paper actually out in Nature, which highlights that around about that time, just before lockdown happened, the first two weeks of March, we probably had 1,500 to 2,000 infections imported from Italy and Spain, which we just hadn’t seen in the surveillance data, until that point.
“So there is much heavier seeding than we’d expected.”
Professor Ferguson said that the government had “underestimated how far into the epidemic this country was, that’s half the reason.”
He said: “The second part, which I think would have been more avoidable, is about half of those deaths occurred in care homes.”
He said that government policy at the time was that care homes would be shielded from infection.
In March, Prof Ferguson estimated that the pandemic would cause at most 20,000 deaths.
According to the latest figures from the Department of Health, a further 245 people in the U.K. have died with coronavirus as of 5pm on Tuesday, taking the total to 41,128 deaths.
