Remember these images ?
These images were broadcasted on March 21st. The day Italy reported the most infections in a single day ever, anywhere in the whole world. Never would the UK expect ever to be compared with it. Until it was. And then, it got worst than Italy.
Today will be shamelessly known as the the day the UK become the third country1 with most fatalities per capita in the whole world, now behind Spain and the currently undisputed leader, Belgium.
Accordingly to the official data released by the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care, and Italy’s Ministero della Salute, UK’s fatalities per 100 000 inhabitants now total 54.23 which compares to Italy’s 54.22. Although this data is official, doubts have been casted on all, but on all countries. Both Italy and Spain suspect some deaths were not caught, but then then, fatalities in those countries are reports in near real time. In the UK fatalities can take up to 2 weeks to be reported. For fatalities occurring outside hospitals, it can take up to 2 months for it to appear on the ONS statistics.
However, the bad news to the UK don’t end here. The other bad news is that pesky green line, representing the difference to Spain and how it’s getting smaller by the day. It means that, at the current trend, the UK will overtake Spain as well within 2 to 3 weeks.
How did the UK get to this ?
The UK had everything to escape the Covid-19 headlines. It managed to escape the deadly first major infection hotspots from Italy and Spain and watched with the rest of the world, how the pandemic ravaged through some of the best healthcare in Europe. Both Italy and Spain had to fight a disease poorly known, only using the data taken from China, a country everyone else distrusts. Both spent an entire month battling the pandemic without proper equipment, facilities and health staff, from which Italy took the biggest toll, paid in healthcare workers’s lives. Even then both managed to deploy field hospitals, bought millions of medical face masks, aprons and globes, and put all hands on deck to overcome the worst the pandemic threw at those populations. When both countries emerged from the Europe’s most restrictive lockdowns, instructions were clear: wear a face mask whenever going out, mandatory face masks on all public situations, stores, supermarkets, public transportation. Even today, some parts of Spain are still under need-to-leave lockdown, with very few exceptions.
Come end of May, and the UK learned nothing from the countries fit affected, failing to enact a proper infection contagion policy. No proper lockdown, not objective rules on who, why and until when to stay at home. Just to put things in perspective. Spain, still maintains a strict lockdown around the capital, Madrid, only preparing to open slowly, starting last weekend. The outcome is depicted on the following chart.
Since April 30th, the UK has a higher average infection rate that any other country on Western Europe, and specially compared with Spain. Unfortunately this trend continues to this day. Hearing now that the UK is preparing to put travellers from the EU in mandatory quarantine is laughable the least.
- technically, Andorra and San Marino still have more fatalities per capita, but due to the small population, each additional fatality represents a huge step on those countries [↩]