London: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson should be back more visibly at the helm soon with his reassuring flair – his recovery has been one of few bright spots through this engulfing pandemic. But he will return with some seriously difficult questions to answer, and that he more than anyone else is answerable for. It is becoming increasingly more clear that the decisions of his government have had a hand in pushing up the daily death toll, now approaching about a thousand a day.
Medical professionals believe that the British government enforced a lockdown, that has now been extended, at the least one vital week too late. Compounding that, its testing is still only a small fraction of its own target, itself a modest one. The aim is to step up to 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, but half-way there UK is still around 18,000 a day.
Moves to trace, isolate and quarantine positive and suspected positive cases have been minimal and only voluntary. On that front India, Kerala particularly, has so far been miles ahead of the British. The government in the UK is now considering introduction of a tracing app. At its earliest that’s still weeks away. Incredibly, airports in Britain are still open, testing of arriving passengers is still not mandatory, never mind any enforced quarantine.
Several British scientists have begun to express the fear that Britain may end up with the heaviest death toll in Europe. That is at present close to 14,000 and counting, with alarming rapidity.
Ministers and government scientists point to a silver lining that the increase is currently not as rapid as feared. New hospitals built to deal with the crisis are nearly empty, one in Birmingham has not needed to be staffed at all. Existing hospitals are said to have spare capacity still, but that is substantially because they have been almost cleaned of other patients and procedures. Government scientists are themselves far from confident that any slowdown of increase in cases may be a trend here to stay, that theoretically should lead to elimination of the virus.
The very frontline for protection stands exposed. Protection for doctors – and in Britain that necessarily means tens of thousands of Indian doctors – can at places be lethally deficient. Doctors are dying on the front line, and doctors of South Asian origin far more proportionately than others because they are still short of protective equipment this late in the day.
The Doctors Association UK says the government is playing “Russian roulette with doctors’ lives.” At least 40 medical staff including doctors, nurses, paramedics, midwives and porters have died of coronavirus that infected them on the job.
On March 22 an Indian doctor said they were going into the job like lambs led to a slaughterhouse. After three weeks of declared statistics on protective equipment that were intended to be reassuring, supply of such equipment at the New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton in the Midlands was declared on Wednesday this week to be “critically low”. The hospital began to run out of protective gowns and even of hand gel and scrubs.
The Northwick Park hospital in London that has been deluged with coronavirus patients circulated an email saying it is running out of the recommended masks and that weaker substitutes may have to be used.
Sterilised gowns intended for single use may now have to be washed and re-used, according to Public Health England (PHE), the official health agency overseeing medical supervision. Moves have been discussed to re-open some local laundrettes to do such washing. Among the last resort measures that health authorities are considering are use of swimming goggles and re-using face masks after treating them with steam. Hospitals are far from certain their staff will get the protective equipment they need.
These are being called last resort plans, but they present a grim picture of how little the government did to prepare for this crisis, and how late it’s been. The new practices being considered and implemented are in fact against the government’s own Health and Safety Executive guidelines.
Boris Johnson will return to face these questions, and more. The declared primary policy of the government was mitigation. That meant primarily voluntary distancing for and from the elderly. Testing was made secondary to that. By the time the government opened its eyes finally to the facts on the ground and the experience of other countries, precious time was lost. And with that, precious lives, with many more to be lost still.
Johnson has not been around to face questions over all this. But in his absence the position for the country became far worse than it did for him. The questions have not gone away. Fundamentally this is as serious a question as the responsibility of a government in thousands of deaths.
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