Shocking error that cost Britain 20,000 lives during coronavirus outbreak

A British scientist who convinced the world to abandon a “herd immunity” strategy has revealed the cost of a shocking error.

The British scientist who convinced the world to go into lockdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic and abandon a “herd immunity” strategy has revealed the shocking error that may have cost more than 20,000 lives.

In an admission that has shocked Britain, the man dubbed “Professor Lockdown” has catalogued a series of stunning mistakes that crippled the nation’s response to the killer virus.

Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson told MPs overnight that introducing lockdown measures in the UK just a week earlier – as Australia did – would have reduced the death toll by at least half.

“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 final death toll by at least a half,’’ Professor Ferguson said.

“The measures, given what we knew about the virus then, were warranted. Certainly had we introduced them earlier we’d have seen many fewer deaths.”

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The death toll currently stands at over 40,000 British lives – the second highest death rate in the world. But the UK has only recently proposed quarantine measures for international travellers, which have been in place in Australia for months.

In his evidence, he said what was not known in March was that thousands more infection cases had arrived in the UK from Italy and Spain during those early weeks than had first been anticipated.

“Just before lockdown happened, the first two weeks of March, we probably had around 1500 to 2000 infections imported from Italy and Spain which we just hadn’t seen in the surveillance data. So there is much heavier seeding than we’d expected,’’ he said.

His stunning mea culpa put the Prime Minister Boris Johnson under intense pressure in the House of Commons overnight, where he was grilled by the Labor leader Keir Starmer if he was “proud” of his COVID-19 response.

At a press conference, Mr Johnson said it was too early to conclude that Professor Ferguson’s view was correct but he did not dispute his central claim.

Travellers continued to arrive in the UK even as coronavirus infections rose. Picture: Justin Tallis/AFP

“We made the decisions at the time on the guidance of SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), including Professor Ferguson, that we thought were right for this country,” he said.

“At the moment it is simply too early to judge ourselves. Frankly, I think a lot of these questions are premature. There are lots of things that we still don’t know, and this epidemic has a long way to go.”

Professor Ferguson was infamously forced to quit his role advising the government after he was caught breaching social distancing rules by visiting a married lover in London.

Overnight, Britain announced a change to those sex ban laws allowing couples who live in separate households to meet up again.

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But before the sex scandal, his research shaped not only the British response but the entire Western world’s approach to the virus, including Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s response.

His mea culpa mirrors the comments of another expert from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), who admitted to the government that the lockdown was too late

“I think it would have been very hard to pull the trigger at that point but I wish we had. I wish we had gone into lockdown earlier. I think that has cost a lot of lives unfortunately,’’ SAGE member John Edmunds said.

New research published this week in Nature by Imperial College found that large-scale lockdowns and school closures in Europe may have prevented 3.1 million deaths.

Professor Ferguson also warned that until vaccines are available, transmission will need to be monitored and new outbreaks responded to rapidly.

More than 290,000 people in the UK have been infected with coronavirus to date.