The UK should have gone into lockdown earlier than 23 March 2020, leading scientists in Wales have told the UK’s Covid inquiry.

Chris Williams, consultant epidemiologist for Public Health Wales, and Michael Gravenor, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology whose modelling work informed Welsh health policy decisions during the pandemic, suggested there was evidence in support of a mandatory lockdown by the end of February into early March.

“My view is that the UK should have locked down on 12 March or possibly even earlier, partly because of what the modelling was saying in terms of the timing of the lockdown in relation to the impact and partly because of the evidence that it would work from Wuhan and Italy,” Williams told the inquiry, which is currently focusing on the Welsh government’s response to the pandemic.

In a press conference on 12 March 2020, Boris Johnson asked people with Covid symptoms to stay at home for seven days and raised the potential of banning major public events, such as football matches.

Williams said he and colleagues were “surprised” the announcement hadn’t gone further and that there wasn’t a UK-wide lockdown, especially given the data shared with emergency response groups such as the Welsh government’s TAC (Technical Advisory Cell).

In a quote from Gravenor’s written statement to the inquiry, the scientist said: “It was clear that once the situation of late February, early March was reached, a full national lockdown was necessary.”

When asked to elaborate, Gravenor said it was clear by this point that surveillance and testing were not sufficient to control Covid in the UK and that it was going to spread “very, very rapidly”.

“At that point we had a pretty good estimate of transmissibility and it seems that there wasn’t really anything else in the short term other than a substantial reduction in contacts [to deal with Covid],” he said.

Counsel for the inquiry, Tom Poole, asked if a national lockdown should have been introduced earlier. “In retrospect, I think it would have been helpful if it was,” Gravenor replied.

The inquiry was shown a graph from analysis produced by Gravenor and a modelling sub-group of TAG (the Welsh government’s advisory group on the pandemic) in July 2020. It suggested if a lockdown had been introduced five days earlier than 23 March 2020, an expected 24% of deaths may have been prevented.

Some 12,500 people have so far died in Wales with Covid listed as a factor on their death certificate.

The inquiry also heard from Roland Salmon, former director of communicable diseases for Public Health Wales, who has argued against lockdowns.

Salmon said the impact of the pandemic and non-pharmaceutical interventions such as lockdowns on young people “who bore a disproportionate share of the economic and social burden” had not been sufficiently considered.

“What I think we lose sight of unless we take a whole-life view of public health is those lost opportunities and economic loss will result in ill health and a loss of life expectancy,” he said.

Containment

The inquiry also heard the UK’s initial response to the pandemic was a strategy of containment – identifying Covid cases and then isolating them and their contacts to prevent further cases.

Williams was asked by the inquiry what his view was at the time on the likely success of this strategy. He said his experience of the 2009 swine flu pandemic suggested it wasn’t feasible in a country with multiple international connections and a highly infectious disease.

When asked if despite this, in hindsight, containment was the right approach for Wales in February 2020, Williams said it was.

“Even if you think you're eventually not going to succeed, it's worth trying,” he said. “You will at least slow (...) the infection. As more and more people travel and get cases that you're not aware of, that's when it [containment] becomes untenable.”

Williams added that taking a separate response from the rest of the UK at this time would not have been helpful to the overall pandemic response.

The inquiry continues next week when Frank Atherton, Wales’ chief medical officer, and Rob Orford, the country’s chief scientific advisor for health, will be among those giving evidence.