UK gov’t accused of complacency over COVID-19: Report

An investigative report by British newspaper The Sunday Times rocked the U.K. government on April 19, claiming a series of grave errors were made early in the coronavirus outbreak in late January and February.

The piece, titled "Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster," said Prime Minister Boris Johnson missed a series of crucial meetings, that stockpiles of personal protective equipment (PPE) were not replenished and that testing capacity was not ramped up quickly enough.

British health authorities announced on April 19 that the U.K.-wide death toll from the coronavirus had reached 16,060.

Britain lost "a crucial five weeks in the fight to tackle the dangerous threat of the coronavirus despite being in a perilously poor state of preparation for a pandemic," the report said.

Johnson missed five meetings of Cobra, the government's emergency council that convenes in times of crisis, according to the report.

The report added that the U.K. sent 279,000 pieces of PPE to China despite not replenishing its own stocks in preparation for increased cases; the last pandemic rehearsal was in 2016 and found the U.K. lacked both PPE and ventilators, but the recommendations were not acted on; no-deal Brexit preparations "sucked all the blood out of pandemic planning"; and that despite the British Healthcare Trades Association offering help making PPE as early as February, their offer was only accepted on April 1.

It said that early on, key members of the government's response team were committed to the idea of herd immunity, something the government has been forced to deny repeatedly in recent weeks and months.

When China informed the WHO of an abnormal number of pneumonia cases in its central city of Wuhan,...