245 people die from Covid-19 in UK as former Govt advisor claims one week delay in lockdown doubled death rate

The United Kingdom’s death toll from confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose by 245 to 41,128 as of yesterday,  according to government data released today. 1,003 new cases were identified during the past 24 hours, taking the tally to 290,143.

Further pressure will be piled on Prime Minister Boris Johnson after a former member of the UK government’s scientific advisory group said that  Britain’s death toll from COVID-19 could have been halved if lockdown was introduced a week earlier.

Britain has an official death toll from confirmed COVID-19 cases of over 40,000, rising to over 50,000 cases when deaths from suspected cases are included.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced the lockdown on March 23.Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson told lawmakers that Britain had taken the right measures against the new coronavirus, but too late.”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.”

So whilst I think the measures … were warranted … certainly had we introduced them earlier, we would have seen many fewer deaths.”Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College in London, produced an influential model which influenced Britain’s response to the pandemic and showed that unchecked, the virus could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

However his later estimate, once lockdown had begun, that 20,000 might die, proved inaccurate because the elderly in care homes were not successfully shielded from the virus, he said.

Reuters / Sky