How the Pandemic Revealed Britain’s National Illness
Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, Britain’s leaders asked their people to do three things, captured in one pithy slogan: “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.”
On the first of those edicts, Britons largely followed through. Main streets, town centers, and public spaces were mostly abandoned, and the government pulled together a far-reaching job-protection program, ensuring that those who feared losing their jobs felt safe enough to not go to work.
The second request was more unusual. During the pandemic, Britain was the only major country in the world to make protecting its National Health Service a central goal. Signs and placards went up outside people’s homes, declaring their appreciation. The words Thank You NHS can now be seen on sidewalks and soccer jerseys, in children’s bedrooms and even, until recently, the windows of 10 Downing Street. In part, this worked. The NHS adapted to the crisis at extraordinary speed, creating the emergency capacity required to deal with the surge of patients. When Prime Minister Boris Johnson was released from the hospital after contracting COVID-19, he said that Britain was winning its battle against the disease because the public had “formed a human shield around this country’s greatest national asset,” the NHS.
On the third count, however, the country did not succeed, certainly compared with almost any other developed nation. Britain did not save as many lives as others. It had the money, the tools, and the wherewithal to respond as well as any, yet more of its people died than anywhere else in Europe. Britain has not been alone in its failure to prevent mass casualties—almost every country on the Continent suffered appalling losses—but one cannot avoid the grim reality spelled out in the numbers: If almost all countries failed, then Britain failed more than most.
The raw figures are grim. Britain has the worst overall COVID-19 death toll in Europe, with more than 46,000 dead according to official figures, while also suffering the Continent’s second-worst “excess death” tally per capita, more than double that in France and eight times higher than Germany’s. It did not protect its oldest and most vulnerable, who died in nursing homes in appalling numbers. It allowed the disease to spread throughout the country rather than isolating it in one area. It failed to close its borders in good time, abandoned contact tracing too early, set targets that were missed, designed government programs that didn’t work, and somehow contrived to let the three most senior figures overseeing its pandemic response, including the prime minister, catch the very virus they were fighting. Now it faces the worst recession of any developed country, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and is once again taking a gamble by easing its lockdown at a relatively early stage.
[Read: ]The meaning of Boris Johnson’s illness
Much of the focus has been on Johnson: an apparent manifestation of all that has gone wrong in Britain, a caricature of imperial nostalgia, Trumpian populism, and a general lack of seriousness. Yet this was not simply an issue of inept political leadership, inept or otherwise: Johnson stuck closely to a strategy designed and endorsed by the government’s experts, leaders in their fields and respected internationally. Even if the prime minister did make serious mistakes, the country’s issues run far deeper. The British government as a whole made poorer decisions, based on poorer advice, founded on poorer evidence,
