All four UK governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat posed by COVID-19 or the urgency of the response the pandemic required, a damning report published on Thursday has claimed.

Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, described the response to the pandemic as "too little, too late".

Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved during the first wave of COVID-19 had a mandatory lockdown been introduced a week earlier, the inquiry also found.

Noting how a "lack of urgency" made a mandatory lockdown "inevitable", the report references modelling data to claim there could have been 23,000 fewer deaths during the first wave in England had it been introduced a week earlier.

The UK government first introduced advisory restrictions on 16 March 2020, including self-

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