LONDON (AP) — Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson returns Thursday for a second day of testimony in Britain’s public inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic, where he is expected to be grilled about how he dealt with the latter stages of the crisis.
Johnson, who is testifying under oath, admitted Wednesday that he made mistakes in grasping the extent of the pandemic and that his advisers failed to sound a “loud enough klaxon of alarm” about the virus.
“I was not being informed that this was something that was going to require urgent and immediate action,” he said, adding that the “panic level was not sufficiently high.”
His remarks came after weeks of testimony by other ministers, including former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who said they sought to raise the alarm inside the government. Hancock argued that thousands of lives could have been saved by putting the country under a lockdown a few weeks earlier than the eventual date of March 23, 2020.
The United Kingdom went on to have one of Europe’s longest and strictest lockdowns, as well as one of the continent’s highest COVID-19 death tolls, with the virus recorded…
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