Boris The 'Part-time PM'

How can Johnson talk about easing out of lockdown this Sunday (May 10th) when we haven't really been locked down? Some have refused to listen to the rules; with key workers being spat at and abused, people meeting up with friends and having BBQs in the garden and police just doing their jobs, advising to stay at home, are being treated with no respect.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has reached his target of 100,000 Covid19 tests per day by the end of April, calling it a ‘national achievement’. However he was accused of ‘fiddling the figures’ by including 40,000 tests which were posted to people but had not yet been returned. Without these 40,000 tests, the target would not have been met, leading Nigel Farage to call Hancock a ‘weasel’ and urging Boris Johnson to sack him for being ‘dishonest’. Since then, the number of tests per day dropped by more than 40,000, with 76,496 delivered in the 24 hours up to 9am on Sunday 3rd May; and only 7% of the 31,000 tests delivered to care homes to test all residents and staff had been carried out so far.

The delay in closing down schools is just a part of the inadequate British response to the pandemic. The government waited longer than many countries before calling to shut down restaurants, pubs and shops and to enforce a widespread lockdown. Johnson's administration failed in its attempt to test the population and track the spread of the virus - with some critics arguing that Johnson did not take the virus seriously until recent weeks, with him even proudly boasting about shaking hands with corona patients, shortly before catching the virus himself.

What is clear, is that Britain had time and Johnson wasted it, an opportunity was missed in February to stock up on vital equipment when the international competition was less fierce. Johnson also missed five Cobra meetings during a period in late January and February where he spent an entire parliamentary recess out of sight at his official country retreat of Chequers, prompting Labour to accuse him at the time of being a “part-time prime minister”. Even though they knew the infection was spreading unchecked in the community, it was still more than a week before the government shut pubs and schools and 11 days before the full lockdown was established. ‘We closed down too late - that's clear from the maths,’ said Martin McKee, Professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who is advising the World Health Organization on the pandemic.

Despite this the Cheltenham festival still went ahead, an annual horse racing meet between March 10th - 13th, with 250,000 attendees, just after Italy imposed a national quarantine. A Champions League football match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid was viewed by 50,000 fans on March 11, the day the WHO declared Covid19 a pandemic. The government's view was that people were more likely to catch the virus in a confined space like a pub than in the open air - so no national lockdown until March 23rd. ‘As soon as it happened in China, there should have been an awareness that we needed to move swiftly,’ said David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 - 2007. ‘The actions should have been: get the ventilators in, get the protective gear in for medical staff and we should have also got going on delivering the tests.’ Johnson encapsulated the British ‘keep calm and carry on’ approach with instructions to wash your hands whilst singing happy birthday twice whilst other countries were properly locking down.

Johnson calling his government's response to Covid19 a success is unbelievable, the UK represents one per cent of the global population and yet can already lay claim to ten per cent of the world’s deaths from the virus. At the start of this crisis, the UK’s chief scientific adviser said that fewer than 20,000 deaths would be a ‘good result’. With the official figure now passed 30,000 and estimates that easily double that, the reality is that no matter how politicians try to spin it, in terms of how we have dealt with this virus and how many have been left dead in its wake, we have the world's second highest death toll.

While i’d love for lockdown to be eased and to be able to have a good summer, I think this would put even more people's health at risk and continue the spread of the virus at a time when a reliable vaccine hasn't even been established yet.