LONDON (AP) – The crisis facing Britain this winter is depressingly familiar: stay-at-home orders and empty streets. Hospitals are overflowing. A daily toll of many hundreds of deaths from the corona virus.
The UK is once again the epicenter of the European COVID-19 outbreak and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s conservative government is facing questions and anger as people want to know how the country got here – again.
Many countries are undergoing new waves of the virus, but Britain is among the worst, and it comes after a dire 2020. More than 3 million people in the UK have tested positive for the coronavirus and 81,000 have died – 30,000 in the last 30 days. The economy has shrunk by 8%, more than 800,000 jobs have been lost and hundreds of thousands of workers on leave are in limbo.
Even with the new lockdown, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said on Friday that the situation in the capital was “critical”, with one in 30 people infected. “The harsh reality is that we will not have beds for patients in the coming weeks unless the spread of the virus slows down dramatically,” he said.
Medical staff are also at breaking point.
“Where before everyone went into a mode of, ‘We just have to get through this’, (now) everyone’s like, ‘Here we go again – can I get through this?’” Said Lindsey Izard, a senior intensive care nurse at St. George’s Hospital in London. “That’s really difficult for our staff.”
Much of the blame for Britain’s poor performance rests with Johnson, who came up with the virus in the spring and ended up in intensive care. Critics say his administration’s slow response when the new respiratory virus emerged from China was the first in a series of deadly mistakes.
Anthony Costello, a professor of global health at University College London, said in March “dilly-dallying” about whether the UK shutting down is killing thousands.
Britain closed on March 23, and Costello said if the decision had come a week or two earlier, “we’d be back at 30,000-40,000 dead. … More like Germany. “
“And the problem is that they have repeated these delays,” said Costello, a member of Independent SAGE, a group of scientists created as an alternative to the government’s official Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies.
Most countries have struggled during the pandemic, but Britain had some drawbacks from the start. The public health system had weakened after years of austerity-oriented austerity measures by conservative governments. It only had a small capacity to test 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 illness.
The government sought advice from scientists, but critics say the pool of advisers was too narrow. And their recommendations were not always followed up by a prime minister whose laissez-faire instinct makes him reluctant to curtail the economy and daily life.
Johnson has defended his track record and says it’s easy to find flaws when you look back.
“The retro spectroscope is a wonderful tool,” Johnson said in a BBC interview last week.
“Scientific advisers have said all kinds of different things at different times,” he added. “They are certainly not unanimous.”
A future public inquiry is likely to address the flaws in Britain’s response to Britain’s coronavirus, but the Inquisition has already begun.
Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee said in a report published Friday that the government was not transparent enough about the scientific advice it received, was not learning from other countries and was too slow to respond when “the pandemic demanded that policies be made and adjusted. in a faster way. timescale. “
The government rightly points out that enormous progress has been made since last spring. The early problems of getting protective equipment to medical workers have been largely resolved. Britain is now conducting nearly half a million coronavirus tests a day. A national test-and-trace system has been established to find and isolate infected people, although it struggles to meet demand and cannot enforce self-isolation requests.
Treatments, including the steroid dexamethasone, the effectiveness of which was discovered in a study in the UK, have improved survival rates among the most severely ill. And now there are vaccines, three of which are approved for use in Great Britain. The government has vowed to give the first of two photos to nearly 15 million people in mid-February, including anyone over 70.
But critics say the government has continued to repeat its mistakes and to adapt too slowly to a changing situation.
When infection rates fell in the summer, the government encouraged people to return to restaurants and workplaces to revitalize the economy. When the virus started to rise again in September, Johnson rejected his scientific advisers’ advice to lock the country before finally announcing a second national lockdown on Oct. 31.
Hopes that that move would be enough to curb 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 for London and the Southeast, but the government’s scientific advisory committee warned on December 22 that that would not be enough. Johnson did not announce a third national lockdown for England until almost two weeks later, on January 4.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland make their own public health policies and have similar restrictions.
“With all the scientific expertise at his disposal, why is this Prime Minister all the power to make a difference, always the last to understand what needs to be done?” said Jonathan Ashworth, health spokesman for the opposition Labor party. “The prime minister has not been short of data, he has not passed judgment.”
Costello said Johnson shouldn’t have to bear all the blame. He said a sense of “exceptionalness” had led many British officials to watch scenes from Wuhan, China, in early 2020 and think “that’s all happening in Asia and it won’t be here”.
“We turned out to be flawed,” he said. “And I think that’s a wake-up call.”
John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said people should be more forgiving of official missteps.
“It’s very easy to be critical of how we did it, but you have to remember that there is no one who has really managed a pandemic like this who has ever done it before,” he told the BBC. “We all try to make decisions on the run, and some of those decisions will inevitably be the wrong ones.”
“Everyone should do their best, and I think generally speaking is the people – including, I must say, the politicians. So don’t beat them up too much. “
___
Follow AP coverage of the coronavirus pandemic on:
https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus vaccine
https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak