A new select committee report in the United Kingdom has found the country's failure to prevent Covid-19 spreading early in the pandemic was one of that its worst ever public health failures.
Its approach - backed by its scientists - was to try to achieve "herd immunity" by infection but failing to introduce a lockdown early cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Correspondent Rob Watson told Morning Report there wasn't on specific person blamed for the response.
"It doesn't say, 'Aha, Boris Johnson got all this wrong or the government, because it's kind of devastating, but then the entire system is to blame," he said.
"If you had to give it the sort of guts of the criticism, it's that the UK was preparing for the wrong disease.
"It was preparing for flu instead of a Coronavirus so when it came along there was just too much groupthink amongst the scientists, amongst government ministers, and they were too slow and too reluctant to learn from what other countries have done."
He said the part of the report was that if the country had locked down even a week earlier it would have saved thousands of lives
"The report says that the government, the scientists made an initial mistake, and that was being too fatalistic, thinking that you couldn't really stop the spread of the disease, and they were far too defeatist about that, and then they locked down too late."
