Rising U.K. Death Toll From Coronavirus Draws Scrutiny Critics link the high death count to a government delay in imposing a lockdown until March 23By Max Colchester and Jason Douglas
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rising-u-k-death-toll-from-coronavirus-draws-scrutiny-11588273558
The U.K.’s official death count from the new coronavirus is rapidly rising toward that of Italy, Europe’s worst-hit country so far, intensifying the scrutiny of the government’s efforts to tackle the disease.
Critics have linked the high death toll to government decisions to delay imposition of a lockdown until March 23, after many other countries took action.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, appearing Thursday at his first press conference in weeks after being absent for most of April with a serious case of Covid-19, vigorously defended his government’s record. “I think, broadly speaking, we did the right thing at the right time,” he said.
He said that the peak of the pandemic had passed and that he would outline a road map to ease restrictions next week. The number of daily deaths has been falling since about April 8, but the decline has been slow, with 674 new fatalities reported Thursday.
In mid-March, while much of mainland Europe went into lockdown, the British government held off, arguing that it was only worth taking such steps once the virus had started to take hold in communities. It also delayed building out mass-testing capacity.
In other European countries “lockdowns were a lot more serious and a lot earlier,” said Matthias Matthijs, a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The deaths of Britons who likely caught the disease in late March while the country waited to lock down is now buoying the death toll being recorded today, he said.
“We probably locked down late if we are honest and we didn’t do testing and contact tracing,” said Nigel Edwards, the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a U.K. health think tank.
Mr. Johnson said the government succeeded in its objective of making sure the health service wasn’t overwhelmed and questioned international death comparisons, saying the data aren’t clear.
“Let’s not go charging in to who’s won and who’s lost at this point,” said the U.K.’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty. He said that making international comparisons at this stage was a “fruitless exercise” and that a clearer picture on performance would only appear once the crisis was over.
New British figures released this week, which add for the first time Covid-19 deaths in hospitals to those in nursing homes and all other settings, record 26,711 deaths, compared with 27,967 in Italy. However, the daily death toll is growing more than twice as fast in the U.K. than it is in Italy.
“We are possibly on track to have one of the worst death rates in Europe,” Keir Starmer, leader of the main opposition Labour Party, told the House of Commons on Wednesday.
Death TollThe UK has one of the highest death tolls forCovid-19 in Europe.Confirmed Covid-19 deaths, cumulative
France has reported 24,087 deaths linked to Covid-19 and Germany just 6,518, but cross-country calculations of death rates are complicated by different reporting criteria. Adjusted for population differences, the U.K. has the third-highest death toll among large countries in Europe after Spain and Italy, with 39 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, said he expects the U.K. will end up with the largest death toll in Europe by the summer.
“It looks like it’s going to be much higher than other countries in Europe, unfortunately,” he said. He added he and his colleagues in the U.S. were surprised at the U.K.’s slow response to the pandemic given the country’s epidemiological expertise, saying there is “no doubt in my mind” the number of deaths would be lower had the country locked down sooner.
Britain came into the crisis with a clear pandemic plan. But it was for the wrong pandemic. Epidemiologists in the country had spent years studying the 1918 Spanish flu. If a flu virus hit, it would rip through the population. Mass testing would be redundant as a herd immunity within the population would eventually be acquired, according to this theory.
“The basis of the plan was, ‘how do we maintain as much business as usual as possible’,” said Robert Dingwall, a sociologist at Nottingham Trent University, who contributed to the government’s pandemic planning in the early 2000s.
The respiratory disease, which isn’t a flu, caught the U.K. by surprise. The U.K. abandoned mass testing on March 12 because it didn’t have enough tests available.
Despite the heavy death toll, Mr. Johnson is coming under increasing pressure from his own party and members of his cabinet to ease restrictions. “People want to see some hope,” said one senior Conservative lawmaker.
The British public has overwhelmingly endorsed the lockdown, but there is evidence that adherence is loosening. According to government data, the number of cars on the roads plunged below 40% of normal levels but rose earlier this week to its highest level since the March 23 lockdown.
While the government has been praised for its rapid response to easing the economic meltdown, criticism has focused on why it failed to use a four-week lead time it had over Italy to better prepare for the pandemic.
In January Mr. Johnson, fresh from both delivering Brexit and winning an election, didn’t appear at the first five emergency meetings the government held on the virus. Downing Street says that other senior ministers chaired the committee instead.
Dr. Whitty, the chief medical officer, said a final tally would be possible only after the pandemic was over and should be calculated by using statistics for “excess deaths”—the number of deaths above the norm for a given period.
The early count of this metric isn’t comforting. The first death linked to Covid-19 in the U.K. was recorded March 6. The seven following weeks through April 17 had more than 100,000 deaths from all causes in England and Wales, according to official data, 35% higher than the average number of deaths for the same period over the past five years.
These numbers also reflect those deaths that might have been avoided had hospital capacity not been switched to Covid-19 and lockdown measures to stem the pandemic not been in place.
—Stephen Fidler contributed to this article.
Write to Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com and Jason Douglas at
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