The UK has so far had one of the worst coronavirus epidemics of any country in the world. The Government has serious questions to answer about failures in its response. https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1265885480144470023

The most interesting graph in that article is probably this: the later you locked down, the larger the number of excess deaths you now have. The Goverment’s dither and delay cost thousands of lives.

Where the UK has ended up is pretty staggering. If you’d told me a year ago that there would be a pandemic and the UK would be one of the worst-performing countries in the world, I’d definitely have been surprised—we’re a rich country etc etc. There have been technical problems…

…bad luck, and so on, but the real failures have been simple: logistics, messaging and, primarily, not shutting down the country soon enough even when the evidence was clear.

We are unambiguously in a worse situation than we would otherwise be: more active infections means it’ll be longer before test/trace/isolate can be fully effective, and we’re nowhere near anything approximating to herd immunity even if that were a viable strategy because even…

…this devastating first wave hasn’t actually infected a substantial fraction of the country. It’s not obvious what we’ve done with any extra time we’ve been forced to spend in lockdown. The Government is still seriously cooking the books on testing statistics…

…the contact-tracing app has been brushed under the carpet, the contact-tracing teams don’t exactly sound world-beating, either in numbers or training… How has it come to this?

Decades of failure to prepare over multiple administrations, and real-time implementation by a staggeringly incompetent government. The vacuum of skills at the very top of government is terrifying, and thousands have paid for it with their lives.

It’s amazing the difference who exactly is in power can make. With a disease that grows exponentially, hours and days matter.

I hope they’ve learned this as we try to exit lockdown. But, given their dangerous response to the Cummings scandal, I’m really not convinced they have.