The Government seems to have reserved all its competence for the vaccination programme. But it It is no coincidence that things started to go right when the NHS – and, specifically, GPs – took over.
Yet we still stand at 126,000 deaths with Covid since the start of the pandemic. There’s no doubt that, whoever had been in Downing Street, there would have been thousands of deaths. The UK is far more densely populated than, say, New Zealand and nothing could have made us as successful at mitigating the effect as them.
There is also no doubt, however, that this Government’s mistakes have contributed to many of those deaths. Mistakes have been made at every turn, from allowing the Cheltenham Festival, Stereophonics concerts and the Liverpool v Atletico Madrid football match (at a time when Madrid was badly affected), to lockdown delays, the fiascos around PPE, shielding, Test and Trace, eat out to help out, getting commuters back to work and all the rest. Not to mention the PM’s personal contributions of skipping vital COBRA meetings, shaking hands with hospital patients and backing Dominic Cummings when he undermined public support for lockdown measures.
Yet, for me, even these mistakes weren’t the main culprits for the tragic loss of life. The true reasons can be seen in the years before 2020, with the decade of underfunding of public services, including general practice, of course. Because underfunding has consequences both at the time, and later on. Cuts to pandemic planning helped lead to the mistakes over the past year. A lack of investment in health services has seen the NHS come close to collapse every winter, let alone during the time of Covid. The dramatic defunding and neglect of social care has affected of our most vulnerable, who make up the vast majority of the 126,000 lives lost. And, going further, allowing economic inequality to widen has probably had the biggest effect on the health of the nation.
But I fear that these are lessons the Government will never learn.
Jaimie Kaffash is editor of Pulse. Follow him on Twitter @jkaffash or email him at editor@pulsetoday.co.uk.
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