On March 9, I was still in Northern Italy. I’d been a Brit studying and working in Bologna for the past two years. The day after Conte called a national lockdown I managed to fly back to London, walking unchecked through Stansted and onto public transport. I couldn’t get a test. So I went into self-isolation for two weeks, confused and disturbed by the UK’s quiet self-confidence and unchanged routine. This was all despite overwhelming evidence from Italy that the virus was more than a simple flu and quickly heading our way. When Johnson reassured us that those returning from abroad would finally be tested in last Sunday’s public announcement, more than two months after my return, I almost laughed.
Just a few weeks ago we were looking at the Italian case as apocalyptic: now the UK has the second highest death rate in the world. In mid-March ‘herd immunity’ was put forward, just days after Italy’s national lockdown. This was in spite of the warning from former WHO director Anthony Costello that “the UK was out of kilter with other countries” and should follow mass testing, tracing and self-isolation. At this point, the UK had 596 confirmed cases. On the 13th, Jeremy Hunt, former Conservative health minister, criticised the strategy, “personally surprised that we’re still allowing visits to care homes.” Two months on, over a third of the UK’s 50,000 confirmed deaths have been in care homes, something that could have been avoided, as Starmer effectively explained in last week’s PMQs.
In early March I was admittedly convinced by UK mainstream press coverage that Italy was facing its own unique disaster, not applicable to the rest of Europe. ‘Italy has an ageing population’, we were told, something I accepted and said so to my Italian friends who had warned me that the UK would soon be in the same situation as they were. I was persuaded by the advice I was hearing that the NHS would be more ‘reliable’ than Italy’s savaged health care system (despite Lombardy’s reputation as one of the best in Europe). Fundamentally, I felt reassured that the UK would be smart enough to avoid Italy’s mistakes, with the benefit of advance warning. Retrospectively, I feel I was also probably guilty of my own belief in English ‘exceptionalism’. Now I am left wondering where that idea came from.
