Boris Johnson stood behind a podium in a Downing Street briefing room that would become familiar to us all and said: “Now is the time for everyone to stop non-essential contact and travel.”
The Prime Minister had, a few hours earlier, been presented with a report which suggested the UK could face indefinite lockdown without a vaccine against the new coronavirus. The day was March 16 2020 and Mr Johnson, flanked by professors Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, was asking the entire population of Britain to stay at home.
The lockdown was at this point only ‘advisory’ and the Government was accused of issuing mixed messages for another seven days as the virus let rip, resulting in thousands more deaths.
Despite pleas from scientists to close pubs, restaurants and other social venues, they remained open until the following Monday when Mr Johnson finally followed Italy, France and Spain and called a full legally-mandated lockdown at a second Downing Street press conference.
But it was on March 16 that the scientists who would go on to become household names had a quiet word with our dithering politicians and the unthinkable became inevitable.
While political journalists attended the Downing Street press conference, a parallel press conference was hastily arranged for health and science journalists led by a man who would come to be known as “Professor Lockdown”.
Prof Neil Ferguson, a mathematical biologist leading the pivotal MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease at Imperial College London, had a report to show us. Their modelling showed how without drastic action, the virus could sweep through the country, kill more than 250,000 Brits and overwhelm the NHS.
The UK’s top modeller arrived late for our emergency briefing having attended the publicly broadcast one at Downing Street that immediately preceded it.
At ours, he was rather more frank than the Government had been, warning the crisis we were going into was “unparalleled in human history”, adding: “We will be living in a really quite different world for a year or more. We are looking in the next few months at major social and economic impact.”
The world was now in uncharted territory with the strict measures on limiting social contacts and quarantining households only able to “buy time” rather than stop the virus spreading.
As I left the Science Media Centre briefing near London Euston at 7.45pm, the capital was already like a ghost town. Not a single person stood on the platform with me as I awaited the tube home on the London Underground.
It was a surreal experience as I contemplated what the scientists had just told us – that what was being referred to as lockdown could last in some form for 18 months.
Until this point government pandemic planners had not countenanced such a draconian measure which was widely considered antithetical to a Western liberal democracy. It was assumed that freedom-loving Europeans just wouldn’t comply.
China had already gone into a lockdown but initially the British establishment has still assumed that was something more in-keeping with the Communist Party. But Asian countries hit badly by the Sars virus had planned for strict restrictions and national contact tracing.
In contrast, Britain’s pandemic planning had assumed “herd immunity” of the population with a flu-like virus would be inevitable and so focused on how best to manage its aftermath.
The realisation on March 16 was that the UK’s pandemic plan had to be ripped up and a new idea implemented.
Professor Ferguson’s modelling was based on new information from Italy which showed around 30% of Britons could end up needing intensive care, meaning the NHS would be overwhelmed in less than a month. His shock report was immediately shared with France and the US.
In response, airlines immediately grounded flights, the following month’s Grand National was cancelled and Sir Elton John cancelled his tour dates in North America. Actor Idris Elba then said on social media he had tested positive for Covid-19 but has had no symptoms, posting: “I feel OK. No panic.”
But some people were starting to panic. The UK’s epidemic was doubling every three to four days. Panic buying saw supermarket shelves running out of toilet paper and other essentials.
Self isolating had already become a thing and many were following Government guidance, but a sizeable minority of the population were more relaxed about social distancing. We were publishing pictures of people gathering in groups as the following week inevitably saw crowds form at popular outdoor spots as Britain was hit by a sunny spell.
The World Health Organization’s Dr David Nabarro told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I would like to stress that in every other country positions are having to be shifted as we know more about the outbreak. We are just dealing with something that’s so new with so many things we don’t know that we have to be prepared for a change in tack from time to time even though it’s distressing.”
When full lockdown was finally announced on March 23, it amounted to the most far-reaching limitations ever imposed by a British government outside of wartime. Professor Neil Ferguson would later say 25,000 lives could have been saved if we had gone into full lockdown a week earlier.
Luckily researchers at Oxford University and Pfizer-BionTech had quietly been working on vaccine concepts that could be repurposed for Covid-19.
World-leading scientists in the UK were among those around the world working most waking hours, seven days a week at the height of the pandemic, to predict its course and eventually develop vaccines and medicines to stop it.
Every week politicians and government scientists would address the nation during live Downing Street briefings, as those of us in the media asked questions to try to make sense of R numbers, spike proteins and Boris-speak such as “flatten the sombrero”.
Britain had to wait more than nine long months before the first Covid vaccines could start being injected into arms, and begin to turn the tide against the virus. But back in those uncertain times of March 2020, that seemed a distant prospect.
Professor Ferguson’s colleague and fellow modeller at Imperial, Professor Azra Ghani, told us: “We have explored a scenario where these measures stayed in place for five months, which is what is taking us through to the summer. We haven’t found any way – at least in our understanding of this so far – that we can ever release these methods until some other intervention can be put in place.
“So really, we are essentially waiting for a vaccine. A vaccine is not five months away. We know it’s at least 12 to 18 months away. So we will have difficult choices to make.” And we all did.
