Name: 5 reasons COVID-19 spiked out of control in the UK
Uploaded: 2020-07-31
Duration: 4 min 33 s
Description: 5 reasons COVID-19 spiked out of control in the UK

[MUSIC PLAYING] KATHERINE DUNN: The UK still has one of the highest COVID-19 death tolls in the world. And the question now is, what happened? The numbers are really sobering. Over 48,000 people have now died. In terms of per capita numbers, it's the highest after San Marino and Belgium. And in terms of the total absolute numbers, it's only topped by the US and Brazil, which are much larger countries with much larger populations. For the UK, in the recent political era that we're in is Brexit. You could say that the country was exhausted. It was divided from years of toxic political debates. There was a new government with a clear mandate, which was to deliver Brexit. And when I talked to academics and historians and doctors throughout the pandemic, this is one thing that's come up, is that in some ways, despite the advice of scientific advisors for the British government, the UK sleepwalked into a pandemic. If we started the first turning point for the UK, we're looking at the timing of the pandemic. As Spain and Italy were going into a very deep lockdown, the UK was still saying that there was more time to go. And by the time the UK went into a lockdown at the end of March, it was already too late. Boris Johnson has admitted the government didn't understand the coronavirus in the first few weeks and months of the pandemic. The second thing is the UK went into the pandemic with insufficient infrastructure in terms of personal protective equipment. Health workers and the NHS complained that they did not have sufficient protective equipment. They could not get tested. And the UK effectively stopped testing anyone who was not in the hospital for COVID-19 and sometimes not even then. And from the beginning, the UK was trailing other countries, saying that these elements were not as important as other countries might think they were and then trying to catch up months later. The third turning point is when Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the UK, himself got COVID-19. There isn't a deputy prime minister in the sense there is in other countries. You were looking at a rotating lineup of government ministers who were all trying to fill in for him, so presenting the picture that there was little central control. And it wasn't exactly clear who had the last word on what decisions were going to be made. The fourth thing is probably the re-opening confusion. Boris Johnson announces a catchphrase, moving from his "stay home" catchphrase-- very clear-- to stay alert. Stay alert, control the virus, and save lives. We start to see a lot of divisions in the nations that make up the United Kingdom, including Scotland. The leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon, in fact told Scots to ignore Boris Johnson and to reopen on a Scottish timetable, which is when you see moments in the history of the pandemic when Boris Johnson is really only speaking for England. Number 5 is the Dominic Cummings saga. He's a chief political advisor to Boris Johnson. He's not elected. And he's a very controversial figure in the UK. Because he was a key architect of Vote Leave, which was the campaign to leave the European Union in the first place. It comes out that Dominic Cummings had broken lockdown rules in the depths of the pandemic. So not only does he not resign-- not only does the government not fire him, the government defends him and says that his actions were right and just, creating the sense of one rule for the British people and one rule for the political elite. If there is another wave in the UK, this could have a really massive set of consequences for how the UK can manage it and the level of trust in political leaders. So when the UK went into this pandemic, it went into it a really divided, exhausted country, actually. And months later, it's coming out of that. And arguably, that's even more the case now than it was at the start of the year. [MUSIC PLAYING] 

5 reasons COVID-19 spiked out of control in the UK

Briefing

From the timing of the lockdown to leadership.

From the timing of the lockdown to decisions made by leadership.