Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:51:34 +1000WeeblyTue, 09 Feb 2021 15:00:00 GMThttp://www.stevebishop.net/february-10-covid-warning-was-first-of-many-ignored-by-johnson/february-10-covid-warning-was-first-of-many-ignored-by-johnsonExactly a year and 113,000 deaths ago UK Health Minister Matt Hancock warned: “…the incidence or transmission of novel Coronavirus constitutes a serious and imminent threat to public health…”


Like Trump, who said at the time that the virus would disappear by April, PM Boris Johnson failed to take the warning seriously and vanished for 12 days on holiday.


He failed to attend five of the Cabinet Office’s weekly crisis meetings where he should have been grilling scientific and medical experts on why they were not advocating the sort of lockdown enacted in Italy on February 23.


By the second week in March some countries were already recommending national lockdowns but Trump was still saying “You have to be calm.’ It’ll go away, and Johnson’s best advice when he should have been urging people against personal contact was to say: “I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands…the best thing we can all do is wash our hands for 20 seconds with soap and water.”


There were 272 active Covid cases in the UK


Far from trying to stop the virus from spreading, Johnson’s top scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance, told BBC Radio in March 13 he hoped the Government's approach would create a "herd immunity in the UK".


The Government was refusing to stop mass gatherings so it was left to sporting and cultural organisations to try to save lives by shutting down. The Premier League suspended its fixtures from March 13, cricket and rugby matches were postponed or cancelled, and theatres closed.


Even former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt questioned the Government's decision to delay cancelling large gatherings.


The British Medical Journal editor wrote “Political populism has been a highly contagious global virus. There is a rich irony in how poorly that contagious virus prepared us for Covid-19.”


“I’m very worried in the U.K. that we’re not acting quickly enough,” Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said. “Speed is of the essence. That’s what we’ve learned with this virus and how contagious it is.” 


Even in the USA public events such as the baseball and basketball seasons and New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade were cancelled. In open letters hundreds of experts warned Johnson he wasn’t being tough enough.


Countries such as the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain closed borders to stop importing the virus but the UK kept its borders open.


Not until March 23 when it was too late to prevent a massive rise in cases and deaths did Johnson order a lockdown. 


It had taken 41 days and three ineffective measures since the February 10 warning.


Just a one-week delay in that period could cost 40,000 lives according to former government chief scientific advisor Sir David King - “unwarranted, a complete cock-up by government," he told Red Pepper.


Two weeks earlier the number of deaths had been in single figures. Now there were 331 with 5,564 live cases.


There would be more than 20,000 cases a few days later.


“Why did it take the UK Government eight weeks to recognise the seriousness of what we now call Covid-19?” asked Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, “…there was a collective failure among politicians...amounting to “a national scandal”.


Despite believing he had contracted the virus, Dominic Cummings demonstrated the lockdown rules restricting movement didn’t actually apply to everyone by driving almost the length of England.


Johnson, having made an example of shaking hands with hospital patients, was no doubt surprised when he contracted Covid-19.


The Health Foundation found the death rate in care homes accelerated sharply after the Government announced on April 2 that care home staff who came into contact with a Covid-19 patient while not wearing PPE could remain at work. 


Johnson then emulated Cummings in demonstrating that not everyone had to obey the lockdown rules by travelling to his second home (banned by his own direction) on release from hospital.


Prof Anthony Costello, former director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London, warned a committee of MPs on April 17 the “harsh reality” was that the UK would probably see the highest death rate in Europe because ministers were “too slow” to act.


In mid-April there were still 15,000 people flying into the UK every day - untested. 


By early May the UK had become the worst affected country in Europe with more than 32,000 Covid deaths 


But not until June did the UK insist on a 14-day quarantine period for arrivals.


As the UK mourned 45,000 Covid-19 deaths, Johnson demonstrated he was totally unfit to lead the country. Just as happened on February 10, he ignored a crucial, urgent warning.


He revealed he had not bothered to read advice commissioned by his own government
from the Academy of Medical Sciences about the need for immediate action to prevent the possibility of nearly 120,000 deaths in the winter.


Further evidence of Johnson’s inability to learn lessons and lead from the front with hard and fast action came on September 21.


Perhaps he had been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that there had been fewer than 400 Covid deaths in the UK in the last month.


On September 21 Johnson’s team of experts forecast an “exponential rise” in Covid-19 cases and warned that to save lives he should act rapidly and stringently with a “package of interventions”.


When he failed to do so, the experts met three days later, again warning: “The earlier additional measures are introduced the more effective they will be.”


He still failed to act, resulting in a sixfold increase in Covid-19 related deaths in the month after.


The experts had wanted: “A package of interventions will need to be adopted to reverse this exponential rise in cases. Single interventions by themselves are unlikely to bring R below 1 (high confidence). The shortlist of non-pharmaceutical interventions that should be considered for immediate introduction includes:

• A circuit-breaker (short period of lockdown) to return incidence to low levels.
• Advice to work from home for all those that can.
• Banning all contact within the home with members of other households (except members of a support bubble.
• Closure of all bars, restaurants, cafes, indoor gyms and personal services (e.g. hairdressers).
• All university and college teaching to be online unless face-to-face teaching is absolutely essential.”

Instead, Johnson merely instituted early closing for pubs and bars; table service only; closing businesses that were not Covid secure and expanding the use of face coverings, with the potential for tougher local restrictions for areas already in lockdown.


A month after that warning Prof John Edmunds, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Medicine, told a Commons committee:.
“If you look at where we are, there is no way we can come out of this wave now without counting our deaths in the tens of thousands.” 


It took 39 days and 4,892 covid-19 deaths for Johnson to take action.


This was the ludicrous three-tier system in which people were free to carry the virus from one tier to another, there being no restriction on travel into and out of hot spots.


The official advice was: “People should try to avoid travelling outside the very-high alert level area they are in or entering a very-high alert level area.”


It wasn’t even an ineffective “avoid travelling” instruction, merely advice to “try” to avoid…


How many more people died needlessly because of those latest blunderings?


An answer is in a report by independent experts which said: “A new study…estimated that a circuit breaker could save thousands of lives…”


On October 15 the Government’s experts estimated there were between 43,000 and 74,000 people being infected in England every day, “significantly above” the worst-case scenario of 12,000-13,000.


But it took another two weeks and more than 3,000 deaths for Johnson to lock down the nation.


The appalling policy of putting the economy before people’s lives was revealed when two days before the lockdown announcement, senior minister Dominic Raab told BBC Radio 4 the government had actually been “striving to avoid a second nationwide lockdown”.


At the end of October The Spectator said a secret report by Government experts had warned on July 30 that in a worst case scenario without intervention there could be up to 85,000 deaths by March 31 next year. 


The long and hard lockdown made necessary by the earlier lack of decisive action has not stopped thousands more dying, has ruined festivities and could drag on in some form until summer, says The Sun.


February 10 2021 - Covid has killed 113,000 people in the UK.

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