It is all very well for the Home Secretary to seek to justify her position (are there rumours that she is to be reshuffled?) by claiming that if it had been up to her, UK's borders would have been closed in March 2020. By March, the damage had already been done and Covid-19 was already running free in most of England and Wales. Ideally, the lockdown should have been imposed on New Year's Day as it was in Taiwan. However, one accepts that detailed knowledge of the virus, only suspicions, were available at that time, so there is some excuse for Western governments to await developments.
But there was no doubt by the end of the month. It was enough for New Zealand to close her borders at the start of February and we should have done the same, at least to the countries where the virus was known to be circulating. They included France and Italy. The first three SARS/CoV-2 patients identified in the UK, late in January, had returned from these two countries and Singapore. At the same time, it would have been realised that we no longer had a viable contact tracing system. Years of false economies in the NHS and GIG had rendered a previously exemplary service unfit for purpose. Yet the people who ran it were still out there and would have returned like a shot to rebuild it, given a chance. That they were not is down to the Tories' dogmatic belief that private enterprise is always better than public service. By the time the epidemic is over in the UK, over 70,000 people will have paid for that prejudice with their lives.
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