The British medical Journal would disagree...
What did officials say about the timing?
Speaking at a live televised briefing on 9 March, England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, said, “It is not just a matter of what you do but when you do it. Anything we do, we have got to be able to sustain. Once we have started these things we have to continue them through the peak, and there is a risk that, if we go too early, people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time.”
On 12 March he added, “An important part of the science on this is actually the behavioural science, and what that shows is probably common sense to everybody in this audience, that people start off with the best of intentions, but enthusiasm at a certain point starts to flag.”
This idea of behavioural fatigue for measures such as lockdown was repeated in other briefings—including by the prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance—and it has since seemingly been treated as fact.
The deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries, told the US news outlet NBC News on 11 March,
1 “Just because a lockdown is imposed doesn’t mean that that is the right thing to do. Timing of an intervention is absolutely critical. Put it in too early, you have a time period [where] people actually get non-compliant—they won’t want to keep it going for a long time.”
Link to confirm accuracy:
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3166.full.print