What the commentators said

The number of people who have died as a result of Covid in the UK is thought to be much higher than 100,000, said Anthony Cuthbertson in The Independent. That tally only includes those who died within 28 days of testing positive. But 100,000 is already a staggering figure. It’s twice as many people as died in the Blitz, and surpasses the UK’s combined death toll from “the Great Plague, the Aids pandemic and every single terror attack and war since 1945”. If that’s not enough to convince you that things have “gone badly wrong”, said Tom Whipple in The Times, consider this: over the past year, the average Briton has been more than twice as likely to die of Covid as someone in Germany, and 4,000 times as likely as someone in Vietnam. This is partly down to pre-existing factors such as “population density, international travel, demographics and obesity”, but government mistakes have also played a big part.

Perhaps the biggest of those errors was waiting until 23 March to impose the first national lockdown, said Samuel Lovett in The Independent. Research from Imperial College London showed that acting even one week earlier could have prevented as many as 26,800 deaths. That set the trajectory of the first wave. Other notable mistakes include the failure to properly protect care homes, where nearly a third of Covid deaths have occurred.

With luck, vaccines will put these dark days behind us and enable a gradual return to normality, said Alex Morton on CapX. But if we don’t lock our borders right down, we run the risk of allowing a new, vaccine-resistant strain into the country. That would send us back to square one. The trouble is, it’s simply not practical for Britain to seal itself off, said Matthew Lynn in The Daily Telegraph. It may have worked for Australia and New Zealand, but we’re a far more globalised economy that is uniquely dependent on the free flow of people. It might have made sense to have temporarily closed off our borders a year ago, when the first Covid cases came out of Wuhan. “With the vaccine rolling out, it doesn’t make sense now. It would simply turn what is already an economic disaster into a catastrophe.”