On the first anniversary of the lockdown in England, the chief medical officer opened up on the lessons learnt over the course of the previous twelve months.
Appearing to concede the UK did not lockdown fast enough, he said there was a lack of testing in Europe to fully understand just how quickly the virus had spread across the globe.
“At an early stage, we had much less of an understanding about how widespread the virus was in Europe.
“For exactly the same reason, because of the lack of testing in Europe and UK,” he told a Downing Street briefing.
“In retrospect we now know the amounts of importation that there were from Spain, from France and from bits of Italy that didn’t obviously have a problem, for example, but at the time we didn’t have that information and that would have almost certainly have led to slightly different approaches to how we did things.”
More to follow…
