LONDON (AP) – The crisis facing Britain this winter is well-known in a depressing way: stay-at-home orders and empty streets. Hospitals overflowing. A daily toll of many hundreds of coronavirus deaths.
The UK is once again at the center of the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe, and the Conservative government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing questions and anger as people demand to know how the country ended up here – again.
Many countries are enduring new waves of the virus, but Britain is one of the worst, and it comes after a horrific 2020. More than 3 million people in the UK have tested positive for the coronavirus and 81,000 have died – 30,000 in the past 30 days. The economy shrank by 8%, more than 800,000 jobs were lost and hundreds of thousands more workers were lost.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan even said with the new exclusion on Friday that the situation in the capital was ‘critical’, with one in 30 people infected. “The real fact is that the beds for patients will run out in the next few weeks, unless the spread of the virus slows down drastically,” he said.
Medical staff are also at breaking point.
“While everyone used to go into a mode: ‘We just have to get through it’, everyone is (now) like, ‘Here we go again – can I get through this?'” Said Lindsey Izard, senior intensive care nurse, in the St. George’s Hospital in London. “It’s really very difficult for our staff.”
Much of the blame for Britain’s poor performance was laid at the door of Johnson, who came across the virus in the spring and eventually ended up in intensive care. Critics say the slow reaction of his government when the new respiratory virus emerged from China was the first in a series of deadly errors.
Anthony Costello, professor of global health at University College London, said in March that it would cost thousands of lives to close the UK.
Britain was shut down on March 23, and Costello said if the decision had come a week or two earlier, ‘we would be 30,000-40,000 deaths. … More like Germany. ‘
“And the problem is that they have repeated these delays,” said Costello, a member of Independent SAGE, a group of scientists set up as an alternative to the government’s official scientific advisory group on emergencies.
Most countries struggled during the pandemic, but Britain had some disadvantages from the beginning. Its public health system has been weakened after years of spending cuts by conservative governments with austerity. It only had a small ability to test the new virus. And although authorities planned for a hypothetical pandemic, they assumed it would be a less deadly and less contagious flu-like illness.
The government sought advice from scientists, but critics said the pool of advisers was too narrow. And their recommendations have not always been heeded by a prime minister whose laissez-faire instincts make him reluctant to fight the economy and daily life.
Johnson defended his record, saying it was easy to find fault when he looked back.
“The retro spectroscope is an amazing tool,” Johnson said in a BBC interview last week.
“Scientific advisors have said all sorts of different things at different times,” he added. “They are by no means unanimous.”
A future public inquiry is likely to point out the shortcomings in Britain’s coronavirus response, but the inquiry has already begun.
Parliament’s committee on science and technology said in a report published on Friday that the government was not transparent enough about the scientific advice it had received, had not learned from other countries and was reacting too slowly when ‘the pandemic demands that policy be quickly and adaptively timed. ”
The government correctly points out that there has been great progress since last spring. Early problems with obtaining protective equipment for medical workers were largely solved. Britain now carries out almost half a million coronavirus tests a day. A national testing and detection system has been put in place to detect and isolate infected people, although it struggles to handle the demand and does not enforce requests for self-isolation.
Treatments, including the steroid dexamethasone, the effectiveness of which was discovered during a British trial, improved survival rates among the most seriously ill. And now there are vaccines, three of which have been approved for use in Britain. The government has promised to give the first of two shots to nearly 15 million people, including everyone over 70, by February.
But critics say the government has continued to repeat its mistakes, adapting too slowly to a changing situation.
As infection rates plummeted over the summer, the government encouraged people to return to restaurants and workplaces to revive the economy. When the virus began to rise again in September, Johnson rejected advice from his scientific advisers to close the country, before finally announcing a month-long second national exclusion on October 31.
The hope that the move would be enough to limit the spread of the virus was dashed in December when scientists warned that a new variant was up to 70% more transmissible than the original strain.
Johnson tightened restrictions on London and the south-east, but the government’s scientific advisory committee warned on December 22 that this would not be enough. Johnson only announced a third national exclusion for England almost two weeks later, on 4 January.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland draw up their own public health policies and have similar restrictions.
“Why is this prime minister, with all the scientific expertise at his disposal, all the power to make a difference, always the last to understand what needs to happen?” said Jonathan Ashworth, health spokesman for the opposition party. “The prime minister did not have a data shortage, but he did not have a judgment.”
Costello said Johnson should not bear all the blame. He said a sense of ‘exception’ had led many British officials to watch scenes from Wuhan, China, in early 2020, thinking that it was all happening in Asia and that it would not come here. ‘
“We were found too short,” he said. “And I think it’s a wake-up call.”
John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, said people should more officially forgive mistakes.
“It’s very easy to be critical of how we did it, but you have to remember that there is no one who has managed a pandemic like this, who has ever done it,” he told the BBC. “We all try to make quick decisions, and some of these decisions will inevitably be wrong decisions.”
‘Everyone should do their best, and I think in general the people – including, I must say, the politicians. So do not hit them too badly. ”
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