First country in Europe in this case, the United Kingdom has passed the sad threshold of 100,000 deaths linked to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus: 100,162 people have died after a positive test of less than twenty-eight days, according to the data published Tuesday January 26 by Public Health England, the Department of Health. According to the National Statistics Office, which records death certificates marked “coronavirus”, this threshold has already been crossed: 103,704 people had died of Covid-19 on January 15, according to the public body.
Compared to the population (approximately 66 million inhabitants), this assessment places the United Kingdom among the countries in the world most affected by the pandemic, ahead of the United States or Mexico. Why such a disastrous record for a rich country, full of internationally renowned researchers, with a state-of-the-art public hospital system in terms of vaccine strategy?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government still refuses self-criticism. “I do not want to preempt the results of the public inquiry which will not begin until after the pandemic”, Nadhim Zahawi, Secretary of State for vaccines reacted to the BBC on Tuesday. Since the summer of 2020, unions and associations of victims have been calling for this investigation in vain. ” This is not reasonnable “ to launch it now, had evacuated Boris Johnson in mid-January.
“The death toll could have been halved”
However, the responsibility of politicians is now little disputed by experts: London was not prepared for the arrival of a pandemic. Like many others, the country had neither the device for large-scale tests, nor the masks in sufficient quantity, nor the capacities of manufacture on the national ground of these products become critical. Retirement homes – private institutions chronically understaffed – were not protected in time (a quarter of the deaths occurred there). Above all, the decision on the first containment came a week behind the rest of Europe – on March 23 only.
“The death toll could have been halved if we had introduced containment measures a week earlier”, declared in June 2020 Neil Ferguson, professor at Imperial College and – at the time – member of the Scientific Council of Downing Street. According to him, about 20,000 lives could have been saved, the death toll exceeding 41,000 deaths at the end of the first wave. “The delay in imposing confinement has cost many lives, insisted epidemiologist John Edmunds, another government adviser, professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. But the data available in March [pour évaluer la virulence de l’épidémie] were rare, making decisions very complicated. “
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