One year ago today the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic. Twelve months on, one can be forgiven for forgetting what life without COVID-19 looks like. But cooped-up Europeans receive occasional reminders, thanks to images circulating on social media of young people partying in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus is thought to have originated, or of massive crowds packing out sports stadiums in New Zealand.
It would have been nice to be in the same place. In principle, Great Britain, as an island, could have implemented the same suite of ‘zero-COVID’ policies that are responsible for such outcomes: a rapid and effective lockdown, with comprehensive financial support, effective test-and-tracing, and what epidemiologist Professor Devi Sridhar calls “very tight border restrictions”. (The United Kingdom, with its land border to the EU via Ireland, presents a tougher challenge, although not one that has received the attention it deserves.)
Our government failed entirely on every single one of these, and the result has been to leave us as a global leader in death and infection. Tens of thousands of people died unnecessarily because of last year’s government failure.
