Britain’s grim statistics of pandemic
A columnist-turned-politician who has never fallen short of words and expressions, in both writing and speaking, suddenly gave up his attempts to provide an appropriate response to the grim statistics of over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths in Britain. On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ended up saying, "You'd exhaust the thesaurus of misery. It's an appalling and tragic loss of life." He, however, claimed his government did everything it could to minimise deaths. And the reaction to his claim has been fierce.
Scientists, opposition politicians and victims' families say a series of "poor decisions" made before and during the pandemic led to one of the worst death rates in the world. It is worth noting that though this official figure already is the highest in Europe, there is another set of accounting—also compiled by a government agency, the Office for National Statistics (ONS)—that shows an even higher body count, by at least 20 percent.
It is difficult to grasp how a country universally praised for providing quality medical care to all its citizens, through an institution called the National Health Service (NHS), could have performed so abysmally in handling Covid-19. After China, Britain is the second country that had successfully put up a 4,000-bed hospital within a week to cope with the first surge of the pandemic. Throughout the yearlong pandemic, it has been at the forefront of procuring medical equipment, PPEs and all other provisions. Britain is also at the forefront of medical research and produced one of the first effective vaccines to fight the pandemic. It is the first country that started a nationwide inoculation programme about a month ago, and has already vaccinated one in ten of the population.
Britain's death rate, however, has exposed its worst weakness, which, according to the opposition leader Keir Starmer, is that the government has stayed behind the curve throughout the pandemic and failed to take control over the virus. In a parliamentary question, he elaborated by saying that "the prime minister was slow into the first lockdown last March, he was slow in getting protective equipment to the frontline, slow to protect our care homes, slow on testing and tracing, slow into the second lockdown in the autumn, slow to change the Christmas mixing rules, slow again into this third lockdown, delaying 13 days from 22 of December before implementing it. And I fear that he still hasn't learned that lesson."
It was not just the opposition party, but the media too was scathing about the government's inept handling of the crisis. Perhaps it was best summarised by the Financial Times when it wrote: "The reasons for this grim accounting are by now well-rehearsed. Boris Johnson's government was slow to recognise the seriousness of Covid-19, slow to mobilise resources against it, slow to impose border restrictions, slow to boost testing capacity, and slow to order a national lockdown. It came out of that lockdown too early—with infections higher than those of European counterparts at the same stage—failed to put an effective test-and-trace system in place, and was slow again to go into a second lockdown in November. It cannot be blamed for a contagious new variant emerging in Kent, but its handling of this, too, has been fumbling".
Call-in shows on radio and television are filled with voices of despair and anger. One doctor blaming the government told ITV's Good Morning Britain show that he had to witness three deaths from three generations of a family who got infected during the Christmas window. It was the period when the government allowed family union with variations according to its tier system based on severity of infection in regions, despite strong warnings from the scientific community.
Many are now alleging that the government underestimated the threat of the new, more contagious variant of Covid-19, and knowingly allowed pre-Christmas easing of regulations. Though ministers have argued that the new variant propelled the country's fatality rates, experts say slower response was the reason for the prolonged sufferings and high rate of human lives lost.
Britain launched its mass-vaccination campaign on December 8 and has achieved inoculation of almost 7.5 million elderly people and health workers. But the race between vaccinating the population to get out of the pandemic and curbing new infections is proving very hard. Government advisers are now warning that another 50,000 deaths are possible, unless strict health rules are enforced. In this context, Britain has now banned holidays abroad for all citizens and returnees from 30 countries are subjected to 10 days of quarantine at government-designated hotels at their own costs. Most of those countries are in Africa and South America where newer variants have been detected, first found in South Africa and in Brazil, which are thought to be deadlier than others. Keeping London open to air travellers was seen as a major lapse in government's efforts to tackle the spread of the virus.
One other factor that hindered swifter action on the part of the government is the resistance against lockdown within the Conservative Party. A group of powerful MPs including former leader Iain Duncan Smith have long been making economic arguments over saving lives. They were lobbying for shielding the vulnerable group of elderly population and keeping all other businesses open. Moreover, there was an ideological question over widening opportunities for the private sector as well as the shrinking role of the government. It has resulted in awarding track-and-trace operations to private companies which lacked experience and skills in health services and failed to deliver desired outcomes.
The Johnson government is now facing intense pressure for a concrete plan and strategy to make sure that Britain does not face another surge and more lockdowns. But for others, there's a lot to learn from the British experience, in particular, of lying behind the curve of the infection.
Kamal Ahmed is an independent journalist based in London.