SHAMED professor Neil Ferguson admits the UK’s shocking coronavirus death toll would be 50 per cent lower if lockdown had started a week earlier.
The infamous bonking boffin – who advised Boris Johnson on the shut down to stop the rampant spread of Covid-19 – told the Science and Technology Committee “we underestimated how far into the epidemic this country was”.
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A key government adviser during the early stages of the pandemic before he quit, Ferguson’s research helped bring in the lockdown nearly 12 weeks ago.
He told the committee: “The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced.
“So, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.”
The UK shut down on March 23 to limit the spread of the killer bug – which has claimed more than 41,000 lives.
Yet, early in the outbreak, experts had estimated that the number of coronavirus deaths would be unlikely to exceed 20,000.
Quizzed on what went wrong, he pinned the blame on a lack of adequate data.
The professor said a paper published in Nature reveals that before lockdown, during the “first two weeks of March, we probably had 1,500 to 2,000 infections imported from Italy and Spain, which we just hadn’t seen in the surveillance data, until that point.
“So there is much heavier seeding than we’d expected.”
Around that time though, the Cheltenham Festival went ahead from March 10-13, fuelling the bug’s spread.
About 250,000 people attended – despite the coronavirus outbreak forcing many other sporting events to cancel just days earlier. This was despite other countries like Italy already being in lockdown.
Top medic Dr Hilary Jones told Good Morning Britain: “Cheltenham Festival was human soup in the pictures – people were together, so close – there was no social distancing whatsoever.
“People were completely ignoring what was happening in the rest of the world and that was a disaster waiting to happen.
“So many of those people would have become infected right there.”
Prof Ferguson told the committee today: “The key things to determine number of deaths is at what point in your local epidemic you trigger interventions – how far in are you when you shut down transmission.
“And we frankly had underestimated how far into the epidemic this country was, that’s half the reason.
“The second part, which I think would have been more avoidable, is about half of those deaths occurred in care homes.
“And we did all this working under the assumption which was Government policy at the time that care homes would be shielded from infection.”
At least 192 frontline health and care workers have died after contracting coronavirus.
The government scientist, 51, leads the team at Imperial College that handed a bombshell piece of research to the government that said failing to take drastic action would cause 250,000 deaths and overwhelm the NHS.
It was a hammer blow to the government’s initial hopes of defeating the virus by building “herd immunity” in the community.
But he quit his role as a key Government adviser after admitting that he had undermined social distancing rules by reportedly meeting his lover at his home.
He allowed Antonia Staats, 38, to visit him during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing to halt the spread of Covid-19.
