Despite the admission, Mr Johnson denied that ministers had been too slow going into lockdown, arguing he “stuck like glue” to the advice of experts.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr Johnson said: “Maybe there were things we could have done differently, and of course there will be time to understand what exactly we could have done, or done differently.”
We didn’t understand (the virus) in the way that we would have liked in the first few weeks and months
The Conservative Party leader has promised an inquiry into the approach to dealing with Covid-19.
During the interview on Friday, he said there would be a time for questions about the UK’s death rate, with more than 50,000 people thought to have died after testing positive for the virus.
“We didn’t understand [the virus] in the way that we would have liked in the first few weeks and months,” he added.
“And I think probably, the single thing that we didn’t see at the beginning was the extent to which it was being transmitted a-symptomatically from person to person.
“I think it’s fair to say that there are things that we need to learn about how we handled it in the early stages… there will be plenty of opportunities to learn the lessons of what happened.”
When pressed on whether he had been too slow to lock the country down and hand out distancing advice, Mr Johnson denied there had been delay.
“No, on the contrary, no, if you look at the timing of every single piece of advice that we got from our advisers, from Sage, you will find that whenever they said that we needed to take a particular step, actually, we stuck to that advice like glue,” he said.
