Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 12 October 2021

The Week’s daily digest of the news agenda, published at 8am

1. Covid ‘UK’s worst public health failure’

The government’s early handling of the pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history, a landmark inquiry has found. The 151-page Coronavirus: lessons learned to date report, published by the cross-party Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee, found that the government took a “fatalistic” approach that exacerbated the death toll. Experts said locking down a week earlier than 23 March 2020 would have cut the 40,000 death toll in the first wave “by at least half”. Tory MPs Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who chair the committees, said the crisis meant it was “impossible to get everything right”, adding: “The UK has combined some big achievements with some big mistakes. It is vital to learn from both.”

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