George Monbiot
A cluster of panic and indecision The UK was second in the world for preparedness. Then Boris Johnson and his gang deliberately de-prepared us
W
e are trapped in a long, dark tunnel, all of whose known exits are blocked. There is no plausible route out of the UK’s coronavirus crisis that does not involve mass suffering and death. If, as some newspapers and Conservative MPs insist, the government eases the lockdown while the pandemic is still raging, the eventual death toll could be several times greater than today’s. If it doesn’t, and we spend all the warm months of the year in confinement, the impact on our mental and physical health, jobs and relationships could be catastrophic. We have been told repeatedly that the UK was unprepared for this pandemic. This is untrue. The UK was prepared, but then it de-prepared. Last year, the Global Health Security Index ranked this nation second in the world for pandemic readiness, while the US was first. Broadly speaking, in both nations the necessary systems were in place. Our governments chose not to use them.
26 ColdType | June 2020 | www.coldtype.net
The climate modeller James Annan has used his analytical methods to show what would have happened if the UK government had imposed its lockdown a week earlier. Starting it on March 16, rather than March 23, his modelling suggests, would by now have saved around 30,000 lives, reducing the rate of illness and death from coronavirus roughly by a factor of five. But even March 16 would have been extraordinarily late. We now know that government ministers were told on February 11 that the virus could be catastrophic, and decisive action was urgently required. Instead, Boris Johnson told us to wash our hands and “go about our normal daily lives”.
H
ad the government acted in February, we can hazard a guess about what the result would have been, as the world has conducted a clear controlled experiment: weighing South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand against the UK, the US and Brazil. South Korea did everything the UK government could have done, but
refused to implement. Its death toll so far: 263. It still has an occasional cluster of infection, which it promptly contains. By contrast, the entire UK is now a cluster of infection. While other countries either closed their borders or quarantined all arrivals, in the three months between the emergence of the virus and the UK’s lockdown, 18-million people arrived on these shores, of whom only 273 were quarantined. Even after the lockdown was announced, 95,000 people entered the UK without additional restrictions. In fact, on March 13, the UK stood down even its own guidance, which had gently requested travellers from Italy and China to self-isolate. This decision, taken as other nations were stepping up their controls, seems baffling. Similarly, on March 12, Johnson abandoned both containment and nationwide testing and tracking. A week later, the status of the pandemic was lowered, which meant that the government could reduce the standard of personal protective equipment required in hospitals, and could shift infec-
