Johnson boasted of being ready to keep UK open for business – and his slowness to lock-down is expected to cost 60,000 needless deaths in the pandemic. UK’s real death toll is already over 60,000
Three months ago, in early February, Boris Johnson made a speech in which he derided public ‘panic’ over the coronavirus pandemic and pledged to keep the UK open for business, boasting that the UK government would lead the world in making ‘the case for freedom of exchange’.
He delayed almost two more months before finally announcing a lock-down:
Experts estimate – cautiously – that Johnson’s slowness to act will add another 60,000 needless deaths to the UK’s toll across the duration of the pandemic.
And today, the UK has the second-worst total in the world of lives lost to COVID-19, even on the government’s unforgivably understated official figures. The real death toll is believed to be more than double the official ‘in-hospital’ figure and has probably now exceeded 60,000, barely behind the Trump-blighted USA and representing a far higher proportion of the population:
This appalling reality puts the UK on double the number of deaths of places like Italy and Spain – even more inexcusable when our government had weeks longer to prepare and chose not to, choosing instead to ignore the World Health Organisation’s advice to test, trace and isolate from the very beginning.
A strategy that has seen South Korea eliminate the spread of the virus without even the need for a lock-down.
Boris Johnson’s decisions have been not merely bad, nor incompetent. They are criminal.
When will the media – or even the official Opposition – begin to describe his behaviour as what it is?
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