In the early days of the pandemic, the UK pursued a plan that was developed for a less contagious, less lethal flu pandemic, which proposed deliberately allowing the disease to burn through the population quickly to develop "herd immunity."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/feb/27/what-are-the-uks-plans-for-dealing-with-a-pandemic-virus

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Despite expert experts that this would not work with the novel coronavirus,, the UK Tory government pushed ahead with it. PM Boris Johnson sought out covid patients to shake hands with while gerning for newscameras. (He ended up in intensive care).

https://www.newsweek.com/boris-johnson-says-shaken-hands-coronavirus-patients-1490214

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How much damage did this political malpractice inflict upon Britons? It turns out there's something of a national experiment that we can use to answer that question, by looking at what happened in the Republic of Ireland.

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These are two neighbouring, English-speaking nations with similar cultures (Ireland was long a colony of Britain), comparably underfunded health services, and they experienced their first covid cases on the same day.

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By comparing the outcomes in the two countries, we can get an estimate of how lethal the Conservative government's incompetence really was.

It's not pretty.

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As medical historian Elaine Doyle writes in an epic thread, Britons are dying at MORE THAN TWICE the rate of the Irish.

https://twitter.com/laineydoyle/status/1249127908876128259

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Doyle points out that as the Irish government was shutting schools, 250,000 people in the UK were gathering for a Cheltenham match.

Ireland canceled St Paddy's Day and shut pubs a week in advance. The UK had megaconcerts like the Stereophonics gig in Cardiff.

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The Irish government made clear, continuous announcements about the gravity of the pandemic, urging people to stay home and take care. The UK government was virtually silent.

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The thing about exponential growth is that early interventions make a huge difference. The UK dawdled for nearly two weeks before taking the lockdown steps that the Irish enacted.

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The Tory ideology holds that governments are incompetent. This creates a perverse incentive: when Tories govern badly, they prove their own point. But Tories are supposed to murder poor people to juice the economy, not murder pensioners AND the economy.

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Boris Johnson is a vile piece of work: a racist, misogynist bigot and a fool. His unwillingness to take (medical) expert advice (and his reliance on finance-sector advice) resulted in the measurable, deaths of Britons. Thousands of them.

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Image:

Think London
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boris_Johnson_(cropped).jpg

CC-BY
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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