Did the Covid inquiry report just admit lockdown was a mistake?

The Covid inquiry has this afternoon published a full report on its first module, assessing the resilience and preparedness of the UK’s pandemic response. It has so far been met with apparently predetermined headlines of how the UK Government failed its citizens by “preparing for the wrong pandemic”, and that the country was “ill-prepared”. The impact of austerity meant that this was certainly true — but the currently unreported and biggest story in the report is its wholesale attack on the lockdown approach itself.

Baroness Hallett’s full report contains remarkable criticisms of the Government’s preferred lockdown policy, which was also adopted across the developed world. Far from stating that the UK should have locked down sooner and harder, as many predicted, Hallett’s team has concluded that “the imposition of a lockdown should be a measure of last resort […] indeed, there are those who would argue that a lockdown should never be imposed.”