What the UK Got Wrong With COVID-19

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What do you make just in the first instance of what the prime minister said today, contain your impatience, I’m not going to lift the lockdown now, we cannot afford a second wave?

RICHARD HORTON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE LANCET: I was mostly relieved that he’s going to go the whole distance. The lesson we have learned from Wuhan is that you need lockdown in place for around 10 weeks to be sure that you cut the lives of transmission for the virus. We are at week six. We need to keep the lockdown going pretty much 100 percent until the very end of May. So, that’s what he seems to be committing to today and I was very, very relieved.

AMANPOUR: So — and you did tweet about that before he came out. You said he must manage expectations and you were hoping that precisely this kind of message would be sent. Do you think — did you notice a different Boris Johnson? You have been watching him for a long time and you have been quite critical, we’ll get to that, about the early response. But do you think his experience has changed him?

HORTON: I do. I think it came across very clearly in the way he spoke. His behavior before he fell ill suggested to me that he didn’t fully understand the seriousness of the pandemic, the signals that were coming in from China and the rest of Asia. And I think now he fully does understand that and he’s been understandably very frightened by the impact of this illness and that (INAUDIBLE) came across in his speech today was somebody who is thoroughly committed to making sure that this epidemic is squashed, it does not come back in a second wave and that we do the very best we can to save as many lives as possible. This epidemic right now is extremely dangerous still and we have to go the whole way until the end of May, beginning of June.