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Fury as U.K. again center of Europe’s COVID-19 crisis

LONDON — The crisis facing Britain this winter is depressingly familiar: Stay-at-home orders and empty streets. Hospitals overflowing. A daily toll of many hundreds of coronavirus deaths.

The U.K. is the epicenter of Europe’s COVID-19 outbreak once more, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is facing questions, and anger, as people demand to know how the country has ended up here — again.

Many countries are enduring new waves of the virus, but Britain’s is among the worst, and it comes after a horrendous 2020. More than 3 million people in the U.K. have tested positive for coronavirus and 81,000 have died — 30,000 in the last 30 days. The economy has shrunk by 8%, more than 800,000 jobs have been lost and hundreds of thousands more furloughed workers are in limbo.

Even with the new lockdown, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the situation in the capital was “critical,” with 1 in every 30 people infected.

“The stark reality is that we will run out of beds for patients in the next couple of weeks unless the spread of the virus slows down drastically,” he said.

Medical staffers are also at breaking point.

“Whereas before, everyone went into a mode of, ‘We just need to get through this,’ [now] everybody is like, ‘Here we go again — can I get through this?’ ” said Lindsey Izard, a senior intensive care nurse at St. George’s Hospital in London.

Much of the blame for Britain’s poor performance has been laid at the door of Johnson, who came down with the virus in the spring and ended up in intensive care.

Most countries have struggled during the pandemic, but Britain had some disadvantages from the start. Its public health system was frayed after years of spending cuts by austerity-minded Conservative governments. It had only a tiny capacity to test for the new virus. And while authorities had planned for a hypothetical pandemic, they assumed it would be a less deadly and less contagious flulike illness.

The government sought advice from scientists, but critics say its pool of advisers was too narrow. And their recommendations were not always heeded by a prime minister whose instincts make him reluctant to clamp down on the economy and daily life.

“The retrospectroscope is a magnificent instrument,” Johnson said while defending his record last week.

As infection rates fell in the summer, the government encouraged people to return to restaurants and workplaces. When the virus began to surge again in September, Johnson rejected advice from his scientific advisers to lock the country down, before eventually announcing a monthlong second national lockdown on Oct. 31.

Hopes that move would be enough to curb the spread of the virus were dashed in December, when scientists warned a new variant was up to 70% more transmissible than the original strain. Johnson tightened restrictions for London and the southeast, but the government’s scientific advisory committee warned Dec. 22 that would not be enough.

Johnson (photo) did not announce a third national lockdown for England until Jan. 4.