COVID

There was a failure of scaling up testing

In February 2020 Neil Ferguson's group at Imperial College appreciated that Covid was going to be a serious medical problem in the U.K.. The government was almost certainly primarily concerned with Brexit. Its initial strategy was to rely on the development of her immunity to ride out the situation. Prime Minister Johnson's does not have appeared to have appreciated what might be about to about to happen. He continued shaking people s hands even doing so when it was apparent that they did not wish to have physical contact with him. On 25 February Public Health declared that it was very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected. By 10 March hospitals admission data had revealed that the situation was almost three times worse than had been thought and that there was a real prospect of the N.H.S. being unable to handle the crisis. Ferguson advised the government that it should introduce a full national lockdown. On 16 March the government introduced a number of light restrictions. A week later full lockdown was set in place.

Ferguson was dubbed Professor Lockdown . Some right-wing media commentators commented upon him adversely. His e-mail account became subject to bot-attacks and numerous hacking attempts were made on it.

Thousands of elderly people were discharged from hospitals so that beds could be freed up. Many of them were placed either in care homes. A proportion of them were carrying the virus.

Resources became so over-stretched that there cases of critically ill people not being nursed in intensive care units.

If the crisis had become serious enough it is questionable whether would there have been people available to nurse in the Nightingale Hospitals.

Entry into the U.K. was not restricted

One of the ways in which the British public responded to the covid global pandemic of 2020/1 was by by eating more white bread. As a commercial product, it had been a slow steady decline for many years. In the year following the start of London's first lockdown 700,000 left the city. They were believed in large part to have been students and E.U. nationals who had been working in sectors such as hospitality.

The radio presenter Jo Wiley and her sister Frances.

On 11 February Jeremy Hunt asserted the view that government had been prepared for a flu pandemic but not a Covid one. This assertion failed to acknowledge the reality that both respiratory diseases that could be contained through physical isolation and contact tracing. Even if the pandemic had been flu there was a woeful lack of personal protection equipment.

In March 2021 Ferguson expressed the opinion that it might be the case that possibly up to half of the U.K.'s high death rate might be attributed to the emergence of the new variant occurring.

For people of a certain age, lockdowns reminded them of London in the 70s.

Website: https://covidfamiliesforjustice.org

COVID-19 Genomics U.K. Consortium

Sharon Peacock, Professor of Public Health & Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, was an expert on the evolution and transmission of anti-biotic resistance who had considerable expertise in sequencing techniques. She became concerned about Covid. She convened a meeting of research scientists with relevant expertise at the Wellcome Building on 11 March 2020. Three days later her proposal was with Sir Patrick Vallance, the government Chief Scientific Adviser. This led to the setting up of COG UK. Through identifying and studying a number of variants as they emerged, the network of 600 scientists developed analytical tools that enabled it to identify the Kent variant in September. It was of more concern than anything that they had examined up until then because it was 50% more transmissible than the most transmissible of the others.

Website: www.cogconsortium.uk

The Flood Wall Memorial

Matt Fowler lost his father, Ian, to covid. In late March 2021 he started to paint red hearts on a stretch of South Bank's flood wall that lay between Westminster Bridge and Lambeth Bridge. One heart stood for one person whose death certificate stated that they had died of the disease. Other people joined him in the task. Within five days 60,000 hearts had been painted.

Location: The National Covid Memorial Wall, c.SE1 7JU

Website: https://nationalcovidmemorialwall.org

The Worthless Clown

In the early days of the pandemic Boris Johnson, the then Prime Minister, made sure that he was filmed wandering around shaking hands with people. Some of those whom he encountered were clearly uncomfortable with the irresponsibility of his conduct. He contracted Covid. He was admitted to St Thomas's Hospital. His case was so severe that he spent time in its Intensive Care Unit.

Johnson was fined 50 in 2022 for having broken his own legislation on social distancing. He did not have the moral integrity to resign from office.

Location: 10 Downing Street, SW1A 2AA (orange, red)

St Thomas's Hospital, Westminster Bridge Road, SE1 7EH

Website: www.gov.uk/government/organisations/prime-ministers-office-10-downing-street

David Backhouse 2024