The trail of bad decisions and delays that led to 23,000 avoidable deaths

As the second official report into Britain's Covid response is made public, a story emerges of a government failing to heed warnings and a first lockdown that was too little, too late.

- Giles Whittell reports

On 24 January 2020 one of the UK government's most senior advisers on viral threats warned that early reports of a new epidemic spreading across central China left "no room for complacency". Even for governments halfway round the world, Prof Peter Horby wrote in the Lancet, "the time to act is now".

Ten months later, Covid-19 had killed nearly 55,000 people in the UK alone. Of those, according to the second official report of the Covid inquiry, 23,000 could have been saved if the country had gone into lockdown a week earlier. By mid-October, Boris Johnson's chief strategist was calling the government's Covid response "a shitshow" and warning in vain that the most important lesson of the first wave of infection had not been learned in time for the second.

"We should have gone a month earlier," Dominic Cummings said.

It has taken five years and £200m to reach this first formal reckoning with the government's Covid response: retired Court of Appeal judge Heather Hallett's 800-page report, published last Thursday. In that time its aftereffects have rippled through the economy and society and successive governments have sought to shape early drafts of the British history of the pandemic.

In an article in the Daily Mail yesterday, Johnson wrote: "I remain full of regret for the things the government I led got wrong and full of sympathy for all those who suffered."