LONDON (AP) – The crisis facing Britain this winter is depressingly familiar: home orders and empty streets. Overflowing hospitals. A daily number of hundreds killed by coronavirus.
The UK is the epicenter of the European outbreak of COVID-19 once again, and the Conservative government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing questions and anger as people demand to know how the country has ended up here.
Many countries are suffering new waves of the virus, but Britain is one of 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 United States alone. last 30 days. The economy has shrunk by 8%, more than 800,000 jobs have been lost and hundreds of thousands more workers in a state of destruction are on the decline.
Even with the new closure, 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 coming weeks, unless the spread of the virus slows dramatically,” he said.
The medical staff is also at a breaking point.
“Whereas before, everyone was put in a mode of,‘ We just have to go through this ’(now) everyone says,‘ Here we go again, can I go through it? “Said Lindsey Izard, an intensive care assistant for nursing seniors at St George’s Hospital in London.” This is very, very hard for our staff. “
Much of the blame for Britain’s poor performance has been given to Johnson’s doorstep, which fell with the virus in the spring and ended up in intensive care. 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, a global health professor at University College London, said in March “dilly-dallying” about whether blocking the UK would cost thousands of lives.
Britain closed on March 23 and Costello said that if the decision had come a week or two earlier, “we would go back with 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 Emergency Scientific Advisory Group.
Most countries have had problems during the pandemic, but Britain had some disadvantages from the start. Its public health system was worn out after years of spending cuts by conservative governments with a vision of austerity. He only had a small capacity to test 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 its gang of advisers was too narrow. And his recommendations were not always heeded by a prime minister laissez-faire instincts make him reluctant to slow down the economy and daily life.
Johnson has defended his record, saying it is easy to find faults when looking back.
“The rear spectroscope is a magnificent instrument,” Johnson said in an interview with the BBC last week.
“Scientific advisors have said all sorts of different things at different times,” he added. “By no means are they unanimous.”
A future public investigation is likely to take into account failures in Britain’s coronavirus response, but the inquisition has already begun.
Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee said in a report released on Friday that the government was not transparent enough about the scientific advice it received, did not learn from other countries and responded too slowly when “the pandemic has demanded that the policy is made and adapted more quickly time scale “.
The government rightly points out that there has been great progress since last spring. The first problems of getting protective equipment for medical workers have been largely solved. Britain 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 struggles to meet demand and cannot enforce personal isolation requests.
Treatments that include the steroid dexamethasone, the effectiveness of which was discovered during a trial in the UK, have improved survival rates among the most severe. 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 all over the age of 70, in mid-February.
But critics say the government has continued to repeat its mistakes, adapting too slowly to a changing situation.
As infection rates fell 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 turned down the advice of his scientific advisers to block the country, before finally announcing a second one-month national blockade on October 31.
Hopes that it would move would be enough to curb the spread of the virus faded 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 it would not be enough. Johnson did not announce a third national blockade for England until almost two weeks later, on 4 January.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland make their own public health policies and have similar restrictions.
“Why does this prime minister, with all the scientific experience at his disposal, have all the power to change the difference, he is always the last to grasp what has to happen?” Said Jonathan Ashworth, health spokesman for the opposition Labor party. “The prime minister has not lacked data, he has lacked judgment.”
Costello said Johnson shouldn’t take all the blame. He said a sense of “exceptionality” had led many British officials to see scenes from Wuhan, China, in early 2020 and to think that “all this is happening in Asia and it will not get here.”
“They found us looking forward to it,” he said. “And I think it’s an alert call.”
John Bell, Regius ’professor of medicine at Oxford University, said people should be more forgiving of official mistakes.
“It’s very easy to be critical of how we’ve done it, but we have to remember that no one has ever had a pandemic like this, that they have ever done it,” he told the BBC. “We all try to make decisions about the race and some of those decisions will inevitably be wrong decisions.”
“Everyone should do their best, and I think people in general are, including, I must say, politicians. So don’t hit them too hard.”
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