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How Britain Succumbed To Covid
The UK on Tuesday recorded its 100,000th death linked to Covid-19 – a horrific statistic that is five times the death rate once described within government as a “good” projected outcome.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, this puts the country at the fifth-highest – and the highest in Europe.
Meanwhile, January has emerged as the pandemic’s deadliest month, with 1,202 people dying on January 18 – the highest ever in a single day.
So, how bad are things right now?
“We’re in a crisis we’ve never seen before,” Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University in London, told HuffPost UK. “It’s clear that the NHS has been overwhelmed and levels of hospitalisation are higher than even in the first wave, and we’re having an unprecedented number of deaths reported.”
Compared to almost every other country in the world, the UK has one of the very highest daily death rates by population, according to data from Oxford University’s research platform Our World In Data. “It’s a really concerning state of affairs and it’s difficult to see an end in sight,” Dr Gurdasani concluded.
In addition to the nearly 100,000 fatalities, the pandemic will also leave huge numbers of people suffering from the serious and often debilitating symptoms of long Covid for months, if not years, to come.
How much of this is down to the new variant?
Dr Andrew Lee, a public health and disease control specialist at the University of Sheffield, pointed to a paper published last week that suggests the UK variant spreads “a bit faster” but not as much as initially expected. “We can say that some of the increase [in Covid-19 cases in the UK] is down to the B.1.1.7. variant, but that doesn’t explain all of it,” he told HuffPost UK.
“There’s a danger in blaming these new variants and in people thinking that the rise in cases and deaths is being driven by them – but that’s not the case.
“Yes, they do...
