UK Covid: Johnson 'sorry for every life lost' and takes 'full responsibility' as death toll passes 100,000 – as it happened
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6.33pm GMT
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6.19pm GMT
Prof Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose modelling prompted the UK government to impose the first lockdown last March has told BBC Radio 4's PM programme he believes more action in the autumn of last year could have saved lives.
He said:
The new variant was unpredictable and did change our understanding of how much was needed to control spread, but we did just let the autumn wave get too far."
In some sense back in March we had much less information to go on than in September.
Had we acted both earlier and with greater stringency back in September when we first saw case numbers going up, and had a policy of keeping case numbers at reasonably low levels, then I think a lot of the deaths we've seen - not all by any means, but a lot of the deaths we've seen in the last four or five months - could have been avoided.
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