In the middle of all the current alarm and worry over the way the Covid pandemic is moving, it is rather unfortunate that we have to get our information on progress, moves to address the problem etc from the UK's Chief Clown, B. Johnson. I suppose the idea is; we have to get the info from somewhere and Prof "Next Slide Please" Chris Whitty is an equally dismal choice. To be fair to Prof Whitty though, it has to be said he is a learned gentleman and while his presentations may be sleep inducing at times, the alternative (Johnson) causes raised blood pressure, expletives shouted at the poor innocent TV set and rushes of adrenaline etc. Still, it's Johnson we've got so let's pinch our noses and take a look at him and his benighted Party as they collectively wade, bluster, lie and obfuscate their way through this pandemic.
I couldn't help but notice Johnson today reiterating his claim that he "didn't attend and Downing St parties". The marvellous thing about this was how his nose didn't appear to grow in sync with the movements of his mouth. Nice one, Boris!
In the almost 2 years this pandemic has been running round the earth, we in the UK must have heard a thousand iterations from government politicians phrases such as "Working fantastically hard"; "World leading success in beating back the virus as a result of our fantastic, world leading something or other". If there is a spare superlative around, chuck it in there. Well, let's take a look at how "fantastically" well we, as a country, have been doing.
On March 1st 2020, the UK had 36 cases. France 130, Germany 129 and USA 73
On April 1st, the UK had 29,474 cases, France 56,989, Germany 77,779 and USA 209,315
By June 1st, things were moving "at pace" (another favoured phrase to be trotted out when convenient): UK had 276,332, France, 189,220, Germany 183,705 and USA 1,850,219. So, UK had picked itself up off the floor and had overhauled those foreign Johnnies in Europe in terms of total cases. Bearing in mind the various countries in Europe have land borders and UK is an island state, one would think that the spread of the virus in the UK would not be as fast as in Europe. That didn't appear to be the case but our government had the answer: Nightingale Hospitals. During March 2020, someone came up with the bright idea of these pop-up hospitals and 7 of them were very quickly built/adapted and readied for service. The first was in London but it didn't take long for people to notice that they were not doing a great deal of business in terms of patients being treated. During March and April 2020, the London hospital treated 57 patients. Then the number was 0 for the remainder of 2020 with 2 patients being treated in February 2021. The Harrogate facility set up to serve the Yorkshire and Humber areas opened in April 2020 and finally closed in March 2021 having dealt with 0 Covid patients. Of course, we all knew that these hospitals could be knocked up and set to work in very short order, using as they did the Army to coordinate and oversee the work. What the rest of us also knew but the politicians didn't know (or knew and were ignoring) was that these hospitals would need staff. In fact, according to the Kings Fund, these hospitals would need around 16,000 staff. Yet, at that time, the NHS was short of 100,000 staff. So really, the whole thing was dead in the water. It could never work without the doctors and nurses needed to operate.
Never mind, we had a suitcase full of "world beaters", "incredibly hard work" going on in other areas so all was going to be rosy, wonderful with sunny uplands etc. In that case a check on the numbers will show how we in the UK are leading the field in efforts to conquer Covid.
A year after the previous numbers, we move to June 1st 2021 and a new set of statistics; Now we see UK 4,490,438 cases, France 5,677,172, Germany 3,692,906 and USA 34,129,338. So, those pesky Froggies are falling behind us but the Germans have a lot fewer. What those countries don't have are "incredibly hard working teams", "world beating solutions" etc Otherwise known as blah blah! So, how about now, mid-December 2021? We have had a lot more time now for the "world beating" stuff to take effect:
Today's figures (13th Dec) show UK has 10,870,468 cases, France 8,258, 692 & Germany 6,548,485. That shows the UK is leading the field when compared to the figures from France and Germany. So, how can that be? We are the nation with the "world leading" ideas etc etc. The figures would indicate otherwise. The story is the same when the number of deaths is counted. Personally, I prefer to refer to the figures of deaths per million population; at least this takes into account the differences in population of the various countries. And those numbers show Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, France and Spain all have lower deaths per million than the UK. In fact, in terms of comparisons with European nations, only Italy and Belgium fare worse than us. Aren't we doing well?
