Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

Failures of State: the Inside Story of Britain's Battle with Coronavirus by George Arbuthnott, Jonathan Calvert

2 reviews

aislingmoconnell's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Death, Terminal illness, and Medical content

Minor: Chronic illness and Cancer

kieranyes's review against another edition

challenging dark sad fast-paced

4.0

What a devastating read. Some of the finest reporting on the UK's COVID disaster now expanded into a full volume. Plenty of new information, even though most in the UK will already be familiar with much of this. For instance, Sadiq Khan's exasperated pleas to Boris for restrictions to be introduced in London in early March 2020. Theres also a more fleshed out picture of the crisis in the healthcare services during the first lockdown, when little information or images leaked out at the time, which the writers say was the result of a deliberate government effort. It's clear the vast majority of the reporting was done before the worsening of the crisis in winter 2020 and early 2021, so this volume will hopefully be updated in future. The first two chapters on the outbreak in China though are a serious misfire - the authors are obsessed with the tenuous idea that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan Institure for Virology, and provide some conspiratorial or circumstantial evidence to support this. Not only did this not contribute to the throughline of the book, the writers seemed very out of their depth reporting on an Asian country which I doubt they have visited or on the technical aspects of zoonoses. However, the reporting on Britain is thorough and deserves acclaim. I hope to see some of these revelations examined in a future inquiry, and the leaders who failed so catastrophically will one day be held to account.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Death of parent, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Child death