LONDON (AP) – The crisis Britain is facing this winter is depressingly familiar: requests to stay home and empty streets. Hospitals overflowing. A daily number of many hundreds of deaths from coronavirus.
The United Kingdom is the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe once again, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s conservative government is facing doubts and anger as people demand to know how the country ended up here – again.
Many countries are experiencing new waves of the virus, but Britain’s is among the worst, and that is after a terrible 2020. More than 3 million people in the UK tested positive for coronavirus and 81,000 died – 30,000 in the United States alone. last 30 days. The economy has shrunk 8%, more than 800,000 jobs have been lost and hundreds of thousands of licensed workers are in limbo.
Despite 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 be out of beds for patients in the coming weeks, unless the spread of the virus slows dramatically,” he said.
The medical team is also on edge.
“While before, everyone was in a, ‘We just need to get over this’ mode, (now) everyone is like, ‘Here we go again – can I get over this?’” Said Lindsey Izard, a senior ICU nurse at the Hospital St. George in London. “This is very, very difficult for our team.”
Much of the blame for Britain’s poor performance was attributed to Johnson, who contracted the virus in the spring and ended up in the ICU. Critics say his government’s slow response when the new respiratory virus emerged from China was the first in a series of lethal errors.
Anthony Costello, professor of global health at University College London, said “dilly-dallying” in March about whether blocking the UK has cost thousands of lives.
Britain closed its doors on March 23, and Costello said that if the decision had taken place a week or two earlier, “we would have had 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 created as an alternative to the government’s official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
Most countries struggled during the pandemic, but Britain had some disadvantages from the start. Its public health system has been eroded after years of spending cuts by conservative austerity governments. He had only a small ability to test the new virus. And while the authorities 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 its group of advisers was too small. And his recommendations were not always followed by a prime minister whose laissez-faire instincts make him reluctant to suppress the economy and daily life.
Johnson defended his record, saying that it is easy to find fault when we look back.
“The retro-spectroscope is a magnificent instrument,” Johnson said in an interview with the BBC last week.
“Scientific consultants said many different things at different times,” he added. “They are by no means unanimous.”
A future public investigation is likely to analyze the flaws in the British response to the coronavirus, but the inquisition has already begun.
Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee said in a report published on Friday that the government was not transparent enough about the scientific advice it received, failed to learn from other countries and responded very slowly when “the pandemic demanded that policy be made and adapted more quickly in time. “
The government correctly points out that great progress has been made since last spring. The initial problems of obtaining protective equipment for medical workers have been largely resolved. Britain currently performs almost half a million coronavirus tests per day. A national testing and tracking system has been set up to find and isolate infected people, although it has difficulty dealing with demand and is unable to impose requests for self-isolation.
Treatments including the steroid dexamethasone, the effectiveness of which was discovered during a clinical trial in the United Kingdom, improved survival rates among the most serious patients. 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 almost 15 million people, including everyone over 70, by mid-February.
But critics say the government has continued to repeat its mistakes, adapting very slowly to a changing situation.
As infection rates dropped in the summer, the government encouraged people to return to restaurants and workplaces to help revive the economy. When the virus started growing again in September, Johnson rejected his scientific advisers’ advice to block the country, before announcing a second national one-month block on October 31.
Hopes that the change would be enough to stem the spread of the virus were 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 southeast, 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 make their own public health policies and have similar restrictions in place.
“Why is this prime minister, with all the scientific experience 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 Labor Party. “The Prime Minister has no lack of data, he has a lack of judgment.”
Costello said Johnson shouldn’t be entirely to blame. He said a sense of “exceptionalism” prompted many British officials to watch scenes from Wuhan, China, in early 2020 and think “this is happening in Asia and it is not going to happen here”.
“We were found to be at fault,” he said. “And I think this is an alert.”
John Bell, professor of medicine at Regius at Oxford University, said people should be more forgiving of official errors.
“It is very easy to be critical of how we have done it, but you must remember that there is no one who has really managed a pandemic like this, who has done it before,” he told the BBC. “We are all trying to make decisions in the race, and some of those decisions will inevitably be wrong.”
“Everyone should do their best and I think that, in general, people are – including, I must say, politicians. So don’t hit them too badly. “
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