‘Once we decided to act, it was pretty fast,’ says Johnson
Boris Johnson said he thinks it is unlikely that lockdown could have been avoided by imposing other measures earlier.
He told the COVID inquiry: “That I have to say that I doubt but I don’t know. I think that the virus is extremely contagious, I think that it was going to describe a pretty nasty curve almost whatever we did. I’m not certain that we would have been able to avoid the extreme action that we eventually took by acting a few days earlier, but I would defer on that to scientists.”
Asked whether lockdown could have been imposed sooner if the government had acted differently, Johnson suggested that it may have been possible if there was a better understanding of data.
Lead counsel Hugo Keith asked: “Could it not have been imposed earlier, had the government been rather more alert in middle to late February and in early March, had it not been blindsided to some extent by the debates about herd immunity, not going too early, behavioural fatigue and so on, and understood properly the data in its possession, thereby allowing it to impose in the weeks of March 9 or 16?”
Johnson replied: “I think that all your conditionals I would delete except the one about the data. I think that that was the key thing that the Sage lacked and it was the sudden appreciation that we were much further along the curve than they thought.
“We weren’t four weeks behind France of Italy, we were a couple of weeks, maybe less, and they were clearly wrong in their initial estimation, we were clearly wrong in our estimation of where the peak was going to be. So the penny dropped, we realised that on the evening of the 13th into 14th and then we acted. But I think once we decided to act it was pretty fast from flash to bang.”
