LONDON (AP) – The crisis facing the UK this winter is depressingly familiar: home orders and empty streets. Hospitals overflowing. A daily number of hundreds of coronavirus deaths.
Britain is once again the epicenter of Europe’s COVID-19 outbreak, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is facing questions and anger as people demand to know how the country got here – again.
Many countries are experiencing new waves of the virus, but the UK is among the worst and comes after a horrible 2020. More than 3 million people in the UK have tested positive for coronavirus and 81,000 have died – 30,000 in the last 30 days. The economy shrank by 8%, more than 800,000 jobs were lost and hundreds of thousands of other workers were in the language.
Even with the new blockade, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said on Friday that the situation in the capital was “critical”, with one in 30 people infected. “The stark reality is that we will run out of beds for patients in the next few weeks, unless the spread of the virus slows dramatically,” he said.
The medical staff is also on the verge of breaking.
“While before, everyone went into a way: ‘We just have to go through this’ (now) everyone is like’ Here we are again – can I go through this? “Said Lindsey Izard, an intensive care nurse at St. John’s Hospital. George of London. “It’s very, very difficult for our staff.”
Much of the blame for Britain’s poor performance was put at Johnson’s door, who came down with the virus in the spring and went into intensive care. Critics say his government’s slow response, as the new respiratory virus emerged from China, was the first in a series of fatal mistakes.
Anthony Costello, a professor of global health at University College London, said in March that “falling in love” would be if the blockade of the United Kingdom cost thousands of lives.
Britain was blocked on March 23 and Costello said that if the decision had come a week or two earlier, “we would go back to 30,000-40,000 dead. … More than 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 for emergencies.
Most countries fought during the pandemic, but Britain had some disadvantages from the beginning. Its public health system has collapsed after years of spending cuts by conservative austerity-oriented governments. He had only a small test capacity for the new virus. And while authorities had planned a hypothetical pandemic, they assumed it would be a less deadly and less contagious flu-like disease.
The government has sought advice from scientists, but critics say its group of advisers was too small. And their recommendations have not always been heeded by a prime minister whose laissez-faire instincts make him reluctant to thwart the economy and daily life.
Johnson defended his record, saying it’s easy to find fault when you look back.
“The retro-spectroscope is a magnificent instrument,” Johnson said in a BBC interview last week.
“Scientific advisers said all sorts of different things at different times,” he added. “They are by no means unanimous.”
A future public inquiry is likely to affect failures in the UK coronavirus response, but the investigation has already begun.
Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee said in a report released on Friday that the government had not been transparent enough about the scientific advice it had received, had failed to learn from other countries and had responded too slowly at the time. when “the pandemic called for the policy to be made and adapted more quickly over time. “
The government rightly points out that huge progress has been made since last spring. The early problems of providing protective equipment to medical workers have largely been solved. The UK now performs almost half a million coronavirus tests a day. A national testing and tracing system has been set up to find and isolate infected people, although it strives to meet the demand and cannot enforce self-isolation requests.
Treatments that include the steroid dexamethasone, the effectiveness of which was found during a study in the UK, have improved survival rates among the most severely ill. And now there are vaccines, three of which have been approved for use in the UK. The government has promised to deal the first of the two blows with nearly 15 million people, including all those over the age of 70, by mid-February.
But critics say the government has continued to repeat its mistakes, adapting too slowly to a changing situation.
As infection rates dropped in the summer, the government encouraged people to return to restaurants and jobs to help revive the economy. When the virus began to rise again in September, Johnson rejected the advice of his scientific advisers to blockade the country, before finally announcing a second one-month national blockade on October 31st.
The hopes that would move would be enough to reduce the spread of the virus were shattered in December, when scientists warned that a new variant is 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 it would not be enough. Johnson did not announce a third national blockade for England until almost two weeks later, on January 4.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own public health policies and have similar restrictions in place.
“Why does this prime minister, with all the scientific expertise at his disposal, have all the power to make a difference, always the last to understand what needs to happen?” said Jonathan Ashworth, the health spokesman for the opposition Labor Party. “The prime minister did not lack the data, he lacked judgment.”
Costello said Johnson shouldn’t bear all the blame. He said a sense of “exceptionalism” had led many British officials to watch scenes in Wuhan, China, in early 2020 and to believe that “everything is happening in Asia and will not come here.”
“We were found missing,” he said. “And I think it’s a wake-up call.”
John Bell, a Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, said people should be more forgiving of official mistakes.
“It’s very easy to be critical of the way we did it, but you have to remember that there is no one who has really managed such a pandemic, who has ever done it before,” he said. he told the BBC. “We are all trying to make decisions on the run, and some of these decisions will inevitably be wrong decisions.”
“Everyone should do their best and I think that, on the whole, people are – including, I must say, politicians. So don’t hit them too hard. “
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