Recommendation 133

Whilst it is clear the first lockdown was called too late, it is not however possible to make such a clear cut judgement about the second lockdown from 31 October for two reasons. First, since the advice was taken and lockdown measures were introduced, the counterfactual—what would have happened to infections, hospital admissions and deaths if the second lockdown had not been instigated—is unknowable. The second reason is that unknown to advisers at the time, a new variant of covid (B.1.1.7) which came to be described first as the Kent variant and later as the Alpha variant, was already transmitting within the population. We were eventually to learn that this variant was significantly more transmissible than the initial strain of covid-19.