BORIS JOHNSON failed to respond when scientists urged him to impose circuit breakers two months before the second lockdown, the Covid inquiry heard today.

Government science adviser Dame Angela McLean said September 2020 was the “worst moment of the pandemic” due to ministers’ inaction.

The advice was initially given to government in a meeting on September 20, with Dame Angela saying she did not remember then-prime minister Johnson “saying anything” in response.

At a meeting the following day, scientists again recommended a package of interventions to help slow down the spread of the virus.

A further Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) meeting on September 24 once more recommended a two-week circuit-breaker.

“If we had acted decisively then we would have learned from March, but we didn’t,” she said.

“It felt like March all over again. We wait till the last possible moment – we delay and delay a decision, and then we have to slam the brakes on as hard as possible with the attendant social costs and economic costs.

“We’d been telling them since we started there will be an autumn wave.

“We said, ‘you should do something now’. But nothing happened.”

Dame Angela said it was “mistake” that the government didn’t implement a circuit-breaker, given that no alternative advice was given in September. 

She also recalled that in April 2020 there were concerns decision-makers had not taken on board “quite how serious it was.”

Dame Angela said during a meeting at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) that the pandemic would take at least 18 months and this was “met with disbelief.”

She said what happened in care homes was a foreseeable problem and that a full lockdown should have been introduced  by March 18 2020 – two days after the government introduced voluntary stay-at-home measures – as data showed it was clear these would not be enough.

The inquiry also heard Sage was neither consulted with regards to the decision to stop community testing in March 2020, nor about then-chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out To Help Out scheme, which ran in August 2020.

She also said that it would have been “useful” to have an expression from the NHS of how many people could they manage in hospital at any one time with Covid and that she was not confident of the Treasury’s use of a simple model during the pandemic.