Matt Hancock has said he was warned the Covid pandemic could kill hundreds of thousands of people in the UK two months before the Government put the country into lockdown.
The former health secretary said the chief medical officer for England Professor Sir Chris Whitty had informed him in January 2020 that in a “reasonable worst case scenario” as many as 820,000 could die. However, he said that when he passed on the warning to fellow ministers at a Cabinet meeting three days later, the reaction was “shrug shrug” as they did not really believe it.
The details are revealed in Mr Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story Of Britain’s Battle Against Covid, serialised in the Daily Mail and The Mail+. They were released as he returned to Westminster for the first time following his controversial appearance on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!
