Former prime minister Boris Johnson holding a Covid press briefing during the pandemic.

The Covid Inquiry has just released its second official report into the UK’s management of the pandemic – and it has torn into Boris Johnson’s government.

Its first report, released in July 2024, critiqued the planning system and the “dangerously mistaken belief” the UK was better prepared for a pandemic than other countries.

This second report is 800 pages long, and examined how the government responded once Covid cases started to hit the UK.

Here’s a look at some of its most revealing findings which the inquiry chair, former Court of Appeal judge, Baroness Hallett, revealed today...

1. UK’s response was ‘too little, too late’

“The inquiry finds that the response of the four governments repeatedly amounted to a case of ‘too little, too late’,” the report reads.

“The failure to appreciate the scale of the threat, or the urgency of response it demanded, meant that by the time the possibility of a mandatory lockdown was first considered it was already too late and a lockdown had become unavoidable.”

It notes that the early Covid crisis in Italy “should have prompted urgent planning across the four nations”, adding: “Instead, the government did not take the pandemic seriously enough until it was too late.”

The report suggests that government scientists underestimated how quickly the virus could be spreading in the early days, too, and that there was also a lack of trust between devolved governments and Westminster.

2. Lockdown could have been avoided

The report suggested if the government had introduced voluntary measures earlier, a mandatory lockdown could have been avoided altogether.

Even if lockdown had been imposed just one week earlier – such as on March 16 – the number of deaths in England caused by the first wave of the virus could have halved, and 23,000 lives may have been saved.

But by the second week of March, the situation was “little short of calamitous” with no proper plan and no testing.

To make matters worse, lockdown was not announced until March 23, 2020 –........

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