Covid-19: Wales doing worse than Scotland, UK worse than Greece

Some time in February, the Greek government recognised that their national health service, depleted as it was because of austerity after 2008, would not be able to cope with a novel Coronavirus epidemic. The health budget had been slashed to a quarter of what it was before the credit crunch and there had been a flight of doctors to more secure* and probably better-remunerated posts elsewhere in the world.

Accordingly, having the same information as other European governments (as well as Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet), they took action. They cancelled mass gatherings and closed bars, restaurants, playgrounds and gyms. By the third week in March, they had also shut all shops apart from supermarkets, pharmacies, banks, petrol stations and food delivery services, and put anyone arriving from abroad into quarantine for two weeks. It worked. To date, there have been only 51 fatalities due to Covid-19 and not all the health service's ventilators are in use. John Psaropoulos, a freelance journalist based in Greece who reports for the FT and al-Jazeera reckons that, allowing for the difference in population, if Italy had been as quick off the mark she would have seen only 751 deaths instead of over 13,100. (Italy has four million fewer citizens than the UK, so our tally would presumably be around 780 instead of 2,921 - a figure which may well rise exponentially as we are behind Italy on the infection curve.)

There is a lesson here for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, too. Both have claimed that China withheld information about Covid-19 which accounts for the delay in mposing strict control measures. But, as we have seen from Greece, South Korea and, especially, Taiwan, early action saved many lives and life-impairing infections, even though Chinese suthorities were slow in permitting the publication of the relevant papers in Western journals.

A total of 126 patients have died in Scotland after testing positive for the virus. The corresponding figure for Wales is 117. The population of Wales is only half that of Scotland, so one would expect the toll to be between 60 and 70 here. The proximity to hot-spots in England is clearly a factor, but one must also wonder about the semi-detached nature of GIG and consider whether the full independence which Scotland has would enable the Welsh government to be more proactive in serving its citizens.

*No doubt that included the health services in the UK. They were not to know that Brexit would drive them out again.