With the benefit of hindsight, clearly, it would have been beneficial to lock down earlier. How many lives could have been saved if the government had acted sooner . It was a gamble that we had no right to take with the british public. From this evening, i must give the british people a very simple instruction you must stay at home. The start of lockdown four months ago. It wasnt how the government saw this crisis unfolding. The uk had planned for a pandemic and rehearsed its response. This was the starting point for the governments response to coronavirus the 2011 flu pandemic plan. It spells out in detail the likely stages of an outbreak and the measures to deal with it. It draws on Lessons Learned from previous pandemics, including one a hundred years ago. The spanish flu of 1918 killed 200,000 in the uk and millions worldwide. Influenza is still considered one of the most serious peacetime threats to the uk. Weve had sort of five documented pandemics of flu in the last 100 or so years. So, it was sort of reasonable to base most of the planning around flu. Back then, efforts to stop the virus failed. It kept on coming. The second wave, deadlier than the first. It took two years for spanish flu to burn itself out. A century later, the governments flu plan assumed future pandemics could follow a similar path. If you read the 2011 pandemic flu plan, they say, dont cause social disruption, keep people calm. Its going to run through. Its inevitable. Its unstoppable. In early january, the government started to put its plans into action. Theyd been monitoring events in china. Good evening. The chinese authorities are taking drastic action to try to stop the spread of the new coronavirus. Wuhan, the city at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, was locked down. The World Health Organization said, prepare for the worst. Make no mistake, it has not yet become a Global Health emergency. It may yet become one. The chief medical officer has revised the risk to the uk population from very low to low, and has concluded that, while there is an increased likelihood that cases may arise in this country, we are well prepared, and well equipped to deal with them. Advising the government on the response to coronavirus was sage the Scientific Advisory group for emergencies. It asked several academics to analyse data about the virus and assess the threat to the uk. We started working on this in mid january, and we realised that the epidemic in wuhan had been much larger than we thought. As to how we would navigate it, i mean, one of the key things there i,s how lethal is the disease, because that really determines how much one spends and invests in a response. Initially, there was uncertainty about how covid 19 might take hold in the uk. There is still a great deal of care needed when you are translating one country to another, and you think about the structure of china, its a bigger country, so its just very difficult to translate one social cultural setting to another. Theres a lot of emerging disease all the time. Its a big problem. And so i think its fair to say we could do a lot of damage by raising false alarms. We mustnt be catastrophists. With no vaccine or treatment, the who was urging strong measures to stop the virus spreading. Any delay is likely to have long term and major consequences. I believe that we have to have a no regrets policy, otherwise we will always be basically pulling our punches. By the end of january, coronavirus had spread to 19 countries. The who put the world on alert, declaring a Health Emergency of international concern. The medicaljournal, the lancet, published a series of articles by chinese doctors. This new virus was deadly. It was absolutely clear by the very end of january that we were dealing with a virus that had a high mortality rate for those people who were admitted to hospital. This was not a simple viral pneumonia. This was a lethal multi organ illness. Please, world, wake up. Hammer this virus and prevent it from being a serious problem or a crisis in the rest of the world. People arriving here from china and other high risk countries were quarantined or told to self isolate. In february, travellers returning from italy were already seeding the virus across the uk. At the beginning of march, the government told the country how it planned to fight the virus. The plan has four strands. Containing the virus, delaying its spread, researching its origins and cure, and finally mitigating the impact should the virus become more widespread. The government said protecting the nhs and saving lives was central to its planning. It said spread of the virus may be inevitable and its aim was to slow it down. I dont think we ever thought the pandemic could be stopped. I mean, it hasnt been stopped in a global sense. Theres no way we could eliminate this virus in the human population. From the start of the crisis, the government asked scientists to model or predict what might happen. Doing nothing, it was told, would mean half a million dead. And can you give me an idea about the conversations that were going on in sage when you were looking at half a Million Deaths . Well, i think the. That, that half a Million Deaths, i have to stress, that half a Million Deaths is the do nothing scenario. Yeah. And we never really expected half a Million Deaths to be seen, because obviously the government will act on that, and the question is, what is the policy . Basically, you have two options when a disease like this is coming. Suppression means youre trying to get to zero cases. Mitigation is you kind of think its happening, and the trick is just to minimise the problem, right . So if a tsunami is coming, we dont try to stop the tsunami, right, wejust try to ensure that the minimum number of people are harmed by it. Some scientists advise against suppressing viruses for fear of creating a second wave of infection, as soon as suppression measures are lifted. Mitigation looked like the best option. One of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population. Without really taking as many draconian measures. I think we need to strike a balance. It was never the governments intention to let the virus spread unchecked. Its strategy mitigation was to manage its spread and limit the damage. The government said the most vulnerable would be protected. But people would still die. It was just this fatalism, that were all going to get it and we might as well just get it over with, where i think thats fine, if you think of people as data points. But if you see their faces and you know their histories, it does raise alarm bells. Sir david king is a former chief scientific adviser. He now leads a group of scientists whove been critical of the governments response to coronavirus. I can only give you one rational explanation for this strategy and that is that they were. Had decided to go for herd immunity. We did hear the phrase herd immunity although the government subsequently somehow denied that they were doing that. Herd immunity is a term used by scientists who study the spread of infection. When a new disease appears and theres no vaccine, everyone is susceptible, so it spreads rapidly. As people recover, they are assumed to become immune. Once enough people have had the disease, infections naturally begin to reduce. So, herd immunity means that people get it. Whoever dies, dies. Whoever is ill hopefully has access to medical treatment and recovers. And then whoever makes it has immunity to this virus, which means that over time, you have a population of whoevers left who has immunity. Mitigating herd immunity is a balancing act. You accept people will catch the virus, but not too many all at once, so the nhs can cope. The governments scientific advisers call it flattening the curve. There are a number of measures that could be taken to try and reduce the peak and flatten it a bit, so we havent got such a sharp number of people at any one time. The government said these measures could include closing schools, quarantining the sick and reducing social contact. Kit yates is a biological mathematician whos followed the uks response to coronavirus. Flattening the curve is all about still letting the disease pass through the population, but at a slower rate so that we dont overwhelm the nhs. And the potential outcome of that is that you achieve some degree of herd immunity. But there was a problem. By the 5th of march, a team of scientists had delivered their findings on the likely number of deaths if a Mitigation Strategy was pursued. At least 305,000. And the nhs could be overwhelmed. I mean, our projections of the potential Health Impact of the pandemic were known from about the 5th of march onwards and were, i think, actively discussed within government. Professor ferguson says he told sage the findings were his best estimate of what was most likely to happen. He says other scientists had reached similar conclusions too. But there was skepticism within sage so the professor had to accept that his findings wouldnt be used as a forecast of what might be to come. If that result was known on march 5th, thats devastating. That means we wasted over two weeks when the virus was exponentially growing through communities up and down the country. This information should have been publicly available to be scrutinised by other scientists and experts, so that we could have had a public discussion and built public support for an early lockdown. Meanwhile for the uk, it was business as usual. Most big events went ahead as planned. What are the chances of catching coronavirus at the Cheltenham Festival . On march 11th, the who escalated the threat level. We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that covid 19 can be characterised as a pandemic. The who urged countries to test, trace and isolate people with the virus in order to drive down the number of infections. Containing these outbreaks and suppressing them is the only strategy to use. Dont anticipate a switch to the alternative strategy of mitigation, certainly not in a country like the uk where it should be possible to continue doing case finding and indeed contact tracing. We said please sustain the capacity to suppress outbreaks right throughout your outbreak management. That is the only way to get ahead of this fire. The governments Testing Capacity was limited, and on the 12th of march it all but abandoned testing and tracing outside of hospitals. The same day, the Prime Minister prepared us for how bad things could get. I must level with you, level with the british public, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time. Coronavirus was now in 118 countries and more than 4,600 people were dead. Europe was locking down. Italy was first. In the uk, the Prime Minister told those with a fever or cough to stay at home. And he repeated advice first introduced in january. It is still vital, perhaps more vital than ever, that we remember to wash our hands. What did you think in march when other European Countries were locking down and we were being told to wash our hands . It was absolutely baffling. I didnt really understand what was happening in the sense of like, what is the plan . I expected at that point for us to go into a hard lockdown. And instead, it seemed like giving up. At all stages, we have been guided by the science. Weve adopted a balanced approach, guided at all times by the science. Every day the science gets better. The government kept saying they were following the science. And so several colleagues and myself wrote a letter to the times asking, can we see the science . We dont understand it. The uk was still following its Mitigation Strategy, assuming we would be building up herd immunity. But had the government been clear enough with the british people . There are huge moral questions to this kind of strategy and also not doing it in a public way, not having a public discussion about it. That was about to change. Senior scientific advisers began talking about herd immunity. Its not possible to stop everybody getting it. And its also actually not desirable because you want some immunity in the population. We need to have immunity to protect ourselves from this in the future. Beijing and that included people working on the uks response to coronavirus. Ive been leaked a set of notes from a Conference Call on march 13th between the director of communications at nhs england and the communication teams from the medical royal colleges. The colleges were told there was no need to cancel face to face meetings for fear of catching the virus, and that herd immunity was government strategy. Nhs england says it wasjust echoing what the chief scientific adviser, sir Patrick Vallance, had been saying in the media that day. Communities will become immune to it and thats going to be an important part of controlling this longer term. 60 is the sort of figure you need to get herd immunity. On the same day sir Patrick Vallance talked about herd immunity, nhs englands medical director attended a sage meeting. Panoramas been told he made it clear the governments Mitigation Strategy would result in more sick people than the nhs could cope with. Two days later, Health Secretary matt hancock denied herd immunity was government policy. Herd immunity is not our policy. Its not our goal. Our goal is to protect life and our policy is to fight the virus and protect the vulnerable and protect the nhs, and thats what were doing. It seems strange to me that one wants to re write the history of the way this epidemic has been managed to erase herd immunity from the story. Ministers have now said herd immunity was not our goal, it was not our policy. Well, i think it really came down to a public backlash where it was publicly unacceptable to say to people, you know, kiss goodbye to granny. It was a huge gamble and it was an unnecessary gamble, it was a gamble that we had no right to take with the british public. The government has said herd immunity is the natural by product of an epidemic. It told panorama, it is categorically wrong to suggest herd immunity was the governments aim. By the middle of march, there had been 43 deaths in the uk. In italy parts of the Health Service were already becoming overwhelmed. They were now in the middle of a storm our government had been warned could be heading to the uk. On the 16th of march, nearly two weeks after professor ferguson delivered his estimate to government of the likely death toll if it continued with a Mitigation Strategy, he made his findings public. The paper said that if the government continued on that course, Critical Care capacity could be overwhelmed and suppression of infections was now the only viable option, and that needed to happen imminently. Hed revised the number of deaths down to 250,000. And the nhs would still be swamped. All the modelling indicated by, really by before the 16th of march that the nhs just would not be able to cope, we would not be able to protect the elderly and vulnerable population well enough to avoid anything but a catastrophic epidemic. That evening, the Prime Minister made an announcement. We were now on the road to lockdown. Now is the time for everyone to stop non essential contact with others and to stop all unnecessary travel. Responding to the warnings it had received, the government now introduced tougher measures. But full lockdown was still seven days away. Simultaneously with our report coming out, the government announced the most stringent social distancing policies they had up to that point but of course they were voluntary and theres a big distinction between voluntary and compulsory policies. The government knew it could be heading for huge numbers of deaths. But how soon . Patrick vallance said on the 12th of march that we were four weeks behind italy. In fact, we were really only two weeks behind. And that was a consequence of getting this doubling time wrong. It gave us a false sense of security. The doubling time showed how fast the epidemic was growing. The scientists thought it was every five days. But they didnt have accurate data. We had a relatively poor handle on the true extent of infection in the country at that time. It was literally only that week that systematic nhs surveillance was stood up. What i mean by that is that started testing all hospital patients coming in to hospitals with relevant symptoms. In the days leading to lockdown, it became clear the doubling time was not every five days, but closer to three. That meant possible disaster for the nhs was much closer than anyone in government thought. We were probably days away from reaching capacity in the nhs. Do you remember how many . I think we were, we were probably a fortnight. Yeah, within a fortnight wed have hit capacity. I think the biggest thing which would have made the difference, both to the scientists like me and to the policymakers and understanding the extent of the crisis, is to have had better surveillance in place and more testing in place so we actually understood how much infection was in the country. I regret, i mean i did push fairly hard and i regret not pushing harder on the testing front. On the 23rd march, a week after scientists had warned of 250,000 deaths, the government changed course. Lockdown became compulsory. The Prime Minister has announced the most drastic limits to our lives that the uk has ever seen in living memory. As the uk hunkered down, coronavirus was already spreading amongst some of the countrys most vulnerable, despite government promises to protect them. In the weeks before lockdown, the nhs had been freeing up space for a surge of covid 19 patients. People who were in hospital were sent back to care homes without any testing, and this meant that many of our care homes got the virus and we got a very large number of deaths. Care home residents have accounted for almost a third of all uk covid 19 deaths. This is cramlington house in northumberland. Panorama was here the week before lockdown. To maxine, lots of love and happiness from tom. The owner, lucy craig, filmed for us inside. Its been such an emotionaljourney. Its been heart breaking at times, its been incredibly demanding. One of my homes had a covid outbreak, and that has gone right through the home. Lucy did what she could to keep her residents safe. She stopped staff moving between homes and paid for taxis to get them to work. She also agreed with her local authority that anyone who might be positive was quarantined before being sent to her but still the virus got through. To be perfectly frank with you, weve had 53 positive residents in the home and weve had six covid deaths. And ive got people saying to me, wow, those numbers are great. No, theyre not, those numbers are horrendous for me personally. Any death is a horrendous death. So far, more than 115,000 people have lost their lives to coronavirus. Some initial vaccine results are promising. For those whove already had the virus, its too early to say what immunity they have and how long it will last. Throughout the crisis, the government has said it did the right thing at the right time. But professor ferguson believes that had the government ordered lockdown just one week earlier, between 20,000 and 30,000 lives could have been saved. I mean, with the benefit of hindsight, clearly it would have been beneficial to lock down earlier. If you can imagine everything had happened a week earlier, that would have made a big difference. Not only has the timing of lockdown been a factor in the uks death toll, its had other consequences too. If wed locked down a week earlier, we would have either been able to come down out of lockdown a lot sooner or, if wed stayed in lockdown for the same length of time, to come out with far fewer cases. The key trade off here is between the Health Impacts of an epidemic and the economic costs and how you can manage things long term. The challenge with suppression which were experiencing at the moment is that you dont really have a long term exit strategy, youre stuck in the same policy until you really have a vaccine. The government says, this is an unprecedented global pandemic. It says at every stage its been guided by the advice of experts from sage and that its response ensured the nhs was not overwhelmed even at the peak of the virus, so that everyone was always able to get the best possible ca re order, order. The committee is now in session. Last week, the chief scientific adviser signalled that mistakes had been made and said sage urged government to lockdown a week earlier. Its clear that the outcome has not been good in the uk, i think we can absolutely clear about that. And there will be things, decisions made that will turn out not to have been the right decisions at the time, im sure about that as well. Im incredibly worried that this winter will be rough and we might see a second wave and a second lockdown to control it. If you just look at the numbers, we have to learn from march and not repeat those mistakes. I dont think theres any perfect system and i think our system is actually very good at what it does but certainly i think some reflection needs to be given to how agile it is in decision making. Theres no shame in admitting that the system made mistakes, this isnt about blaming individuals. This is about understanding why our system failed. The government says there will be an independent inquiry into the coronavirus crisis. No date has yet been set. The government says it must remain focused on tackling the pandemic and saving lives. But there are calls for an inquiry now to help prepare us for what might come next. Hello there. Thursdays rain will continue to ease off move thursdays rain will continue to ease off move away, we thursdays rain will continue to ease off move away, we may be left with showers where there is more cloud and there will be showers for a while and northern parts of scotland but otherwise generally dry with sunshine at times, before it clouds over and we see rain in Northern Ireland for many it will be a brighter and warmer day. Widely the 20s in england and wales, 2526 in the south east of england. Rain pushing eastwards overnight and still around into saturday morning and as it brightens up to get some sunshine triggering heavy and thundery downpours and the chance for the rain back into southern and south eastern parts of england. The details may change, the rain is never too far away on saturday. As we move into the second half of the weekend it is still breezy with stronger winds in the north west where we could see some of the wettest weather on sunday. We will see a few showers elsewhere were some donors while perhaps a slightly cooler day for most but a little warmer on easter england Eastern England were Richard Dreyer on sunday. Where it should be dreyer on sunday. This is bbc news. Welcome if youre watching here in the uk, on pbs in america, or around the globe. Im aaron safir. Our top stories cancelled because of coronavirus President Trump calls off the republican convention, one of the partys biggest pre election events. Us secretary of state mike pompeo calls on the world to turn on china, warning of a new tyranny from beijing. Researchers warn the amount of plastic ending up in the ocean could nearly triple in the next 20 years, unless urgent actions taken. And they were postponed by the pandemic the Tokyo Olympics were supposed to start today. But should the games go ahead at all