01/06/2020
Keep calm and carry on
When I asked my Chinese flatmate, what the people of China thought about the response of the United Kingdom, to the pending destruction of the coronavirus outbreak, she repeated the famous words of wartime spirit in Britain, ‘Keep calm and carry on’. While she was scared to go outside and baffled at the lack of people wearing face masks, I was working in retail for a dwindling number of customers each day, carrying on as usual.
When the nation reached a total of 206 cases, Boris Johnson attended the six nations rugby match between England and Wales. When Athletico Madrid played Liverpool in Merseyside, 3,000 fans flew over from Madrid, where 31 out of 47 deaths had been in Spain. While 250,000 people attended Cheltenham festival over three days, 11 people had died from the virus, professional football had been suspended and Spain had declared a state of emergency. Why didn’t the government stop people going to work earlier, why were these events allowed to go ahead. Were we heading towards a herd immunity strategy?
Was herd immunity ever an option?
The government were arguably allowing for infections to rise in number to build up the population’s herd immunity. Were the government trying to protect the economy? There is evidence to believe so, the government ordered, pubs, restaurants and large gatherings to stop later than most of its European counterparts. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, claimed the UK ‘seemed to accept that the virus is unstoppable and will become an annual, seasonal infection’, this was evidently shown by Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific advisor. Vallance told the public the government’s plan to work towards ‘some degree of herd immunity’, where the majority of the population would have to contract the virus, therefore becoming immune for an unknown period of time.
With the virus travelling throughout Europe at a devastating rate, it became clear herd immunity wasn’t an option for the UK and ‘drastic action’ was required. With news coming, that if no action was taken, a quarter of a million people would die. Actions were taken by Johnson, announcing people must work from home and refrain from unnecessary travel and social contact, before putting the UK into lockdown.
The government were caught in two minds over whether the economy or the public well-being should have been prioritised. With a high population density of 259 people per square kilometre, and being the 21st most populated nation in the World, the UK government should have implemented lockdown earlier.
Valuable time was wasted, in this period of indecisiveness, tying to realise the dream of a society immune to the virus, while maintaining the economy in the process. By resisting an early economic shutdown, time was lost in protecting people from unnecessary death.
Better late than never
In the weeks after the lockdown was implemented, the government found itself in a vulnerable position, facing up to a failure to prepare. With large focus prioritised on Brexit and free trade, the weeks leading up to March were certainly preoccupied, politicians clearly distracted.
If you felt symptoms, you were unlikely to get a test due to the UK’s lacking testing capacity, once again due to a failure to prepare, leaving the UK back of the queue for stocking up. I know from experience the difficulty in receiving a test. Not only was that a problem, if you were ill enough to get a test, the situation when in hospital was not an ideal one for doctors and nurses. Ministers came under intense criticism from the media for a lack of protective equipment for frontline NHS staff. Shortages of vital health equipment and tests snuck up on the British government, failing to protect the key workers.
Global problem, national solutions
Around the globe, different approaches and experiences to the outbreak, have had different levels of success. Noticeable approaches have been Sweden’s and New Zealand’s. The Swedish government trusted the public to voluntarily social distance and allowed most of society to carry on as normal, mirroring a strategy that is closest to herd immunity. To the other extreme, New Zealand applied a strict strategy to contain the virus, locking down the country after only 102 cases were confirmed with no deaths. New Zealand is considered one of the biggest success stories, highlighting the mistakes made by the UK government.
Could the UK have approached the outbreak like the kiwis had done? Well, unlikely. New Zealand, a remote island with easily closed borders, has a population roughly 13 times smaller than the UK, it isn’t a financial hub on the scale of the UK and it has much more societal compliance with government actions. Whereas in the UK, government’s scientific advisors were warning the public would have reacted badly to a hard and early lockdown, with only 14% of the UK population having trust in politicians prior to the general election. Could we have done what Sweden had done? The 250,000 predicted to die says no.
Each country has unique experiences with coronavirus, the UK government made clear mistakes from indecisiveness, however with each strategy pointing towards looming societal or economic destruction, no wonder the UK government struggled to make the difficult damaging choice.
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