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A review by cjmckeon
Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle with Coronavirus by George Arbuthnott, Jonathan Calvert
4.0
A damning indictment of the British government’s handling of the Covid crisis, based on a year of investigative journalism by the Sunday Times.
Nobody reading this can be in any doubt that the government in general and Boris Johnson in particular failed to take the pandemic seriously at the start, failed three times to respond fast enough and brought about many more infections and deaths than might have happened had they actually been “following the science” while simultaneously causing more economic damage than was necessary.
Much of this will be familiar, but in the chaos of the past year some will have been forgotten or missed and it is worth being reminded.
But perhaps the most shocking of this book’s revelations is not that Johnson made the same mistake three times or failed to give the pandemic his full attention, but that the NHS did not cope with the first wave.
Although the figures suggest ICUs were never overrun, the reality is that this was because many elderly patients or those with underlying conditions were denied treatment that could have saved their lives. Doctors were forced to prioritise the younger and fitter in the belief they had a better chance of survival, and when confronted with this the NHS and the government appear to have either lied about it or simply not known what was going on.
There are some gaps in the story. Although the book claims to be about Britain, it is really about England with little focus on the devolved health services in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and what was different (or the same) about their ha doing of the pandemic. There’s also not much about local efforts and the protracted rows over, in particular, the tier system in Manchester.
Nevertheless, it is vital reading and, as the vaccine casts our memories in a more positive light, a necessary reminder of just how badly the government performed over 2020.
Nobody reading this can be in any doubt that the government in general and Boris Johnson in particular failed to take the pandemic seriously at the start, failed three times to respond fast enough and brought about many more infections and deaths than might have happened had they actually been “following the science” while simultaneously causing more economic damage than was necessary.
Much of this will be familiar, but in the chaos of the past year some will have been forgotten or missed and it is worth being reminded.
But perhaps the most shocking of this book’s revelations is not that Johnson made the same mistake three times or failed to give the pandemic his full attention, but that the NHS did not cope with the first wave.
Although the figures suggest ICUs were never overrun, the reality is that this was because many elderly patients or those with underlying conditions were denied treatment that could have saved their lives. Doctors were forced to prioritise the younger and fitter in the belief they had a better chance of survival, and when confronted with this the NHS and the government appear to have either lied about it or simply not known what was going on.
There are some gaps in the story. Although the book claims to be about Britain, it is really about England with little focus on the devolved health services in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and what was different (or the same) about their ha doing of the pandemic. There’s also not much about local efforts and the protracted rows over, in particular, the tier system in Manchester.
Nevertheless, it is vital reading and, as the vaccine casts our memories in a more positive light, a necessary reminder of just how badly the government performed over 2020.