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Insouciance and inexperience: A deadly combination when dealing with COVID ‐19
Author(s) -
Paton Calum
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
the international journal of health planning and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.672
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1099-1751
pISSN - 0749-6753
DOI - 10.1002/hpm.2991
Subject(s) - covid-19 , politics , pandemic , prime minister , product (mathematics) , political science , test (biology) , key (lock) , public relations , history , medicine , psychology , law , virology , computer security , computer science , paleontology , geometry , mathematics , disease , pathology , outbreak , infectious disease (medical specialty) , biology
Summary This article gives key reasons for the UK's tardy and confused attempts to react to the COVID‐19 pandemic. It explains very poor outcomes in the UK (in terms of the spread of the virus and high mortality, already striking at the time of writing), in terms of an initial lack of political will to prioritise public health, itself a product of a strong Prime Minister who made the “wrong call”. It also highlights a failure to “follow the science”, except in so far as the “science” had already accepted some dubious political judgements and the lack of capacity to test as the starting‐point.