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The total number of deaths in the UK within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test has now passed 100,000.
Dr Julian Tang, Honorary Associate Professor/Clinical Virologist, University of Leicester, said:
“We’ve seen the emergence of many novel viruses in the last 40 years: HIV/AIDS (1980s, global), Sin Nombre hantavirus (1994, USA), avian influenza A(H5N1) (1997, China/Hong Kong), Nipah virus (1998/1999 Malaysia/Singapore), SARS-COV (2003, China/Hong Kong), pandemic influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 (2009, global), MERS-CoV (2012, Middle-East), avian influenza A(H7N9) (2013, China) – as well as older viruses with unusual manifestations like Zika virus (2015/2016, Brazil -with microcephaly).
“But these outbreaks happened elsewhere and the UK and Europe were very happy to share their public health expertise overseas. Unfortunately, with COVID-19, on home ground, this same public health expertise has been unable to control this virus.
“With a novel respiratory virus, we cannot assume anything – including but not limited too: that it is not airborne and/or that masks don’t work; or that asymptomatic infections don’t occur and/or that they don’t transmit and/or they don’t need testing; or that children do not get infected and/or don’t transmit.
“Why not? Exactly because the virus is novel – meaning that we don’t know much about it. If we don’t know much then we have to be careful and not assume anything.
“If these false assumptions are made early on and the opportunity to control the virus is missed while the numbers of infections are still low, then you may well see what we have in the UK – with the oscillation in and out of lockdowns as the government attempts to keep businesses and schools open when case numbers fall – only to go back into lockdown as case numbers rise again as a result of those activities.
“This will continue until a sufficient level of herd immunity is reached in the population by natural infection and/or vaccination, to slow the spread of the virus through the population.
“However, if the numbers of infections were suppressed and the virus eliminated very early on in the pandemic – as was seen with the early application of strict and effective public health measures in Taiwan and New Zealand:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025203
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(20)30044-4/fulltext
then the economy and schooling would have had the chance to recover over a longer period.
“For this to work, the numbers of imported cases also needed to be controlled or blocked – as has was the case in New Zealand – from very early on in the pandemic.
“This type of early, severe national intervention (with adequate and essential government financial support) will need a quick, early buy-in from all the political parties, scientists and the general public – otherwise if it is debated for too long, the virus will be able to establish a large foothold in the population – and what follows will be what we have seen and in the UK and Europe for the past 12 months – unfortunately the virus does not care about nor respect the democratic process.
“Passing 100,000 COVID-19 deaths is a national tragedy but these numbers will rise further – and it’s not certain that lessons have really been learnt yet.
“Why not? Because this is the third national lockdown – and if measures are relaxed too much again in mid-February, there may be a fourth lockdown as even with possibly 20 million people immunised by then with at least one dose of vaccine and/or natural infection, there will still be about over 45 million people across the UK who are still susceptible to COVID-19 and to whom the virus can still spread.”
Prof Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, University of Edinburgh, said:
“One hundred thousand deaths is a grim milestone for the UK to reach. We knew back in January 2020 that COVID-19 was capable of exerting such a huge toll. The measures taken since then have undoubtedly had an impact but they have failed to prevent loss of life on a scale not seen since Spanish flu a century ago.
“There will surely be official inquiries into the reasons why the UK has suffered one of the worst COVID-19 epidemics in the world. There are multiple explanations for this unpalatable truth.
“One fact we must accept to put the statistics in context is that the UK will always be particularly vulnerable to a pandemic of this nature given the realities of our geography and demography.
“Perhaps the biggest failing of the past twelve months has been to persist with the idea that the best and only way to protect the small minority that are extremely vulnerable to COVID-19 was to try to “suppress the virus” in the wider population. This approach has been tried, failed, tried again and failed again. We needed to do more.
“If we had invested a fraction of the effort put into suppressing the virus into protecting the vulnerable the UK’s death toll could have been far lower. If we had managed to reduce the risk to the most vulnerable by just a 25% we would have saved at least 25,000 lives.
“The lesson we should take from the past twelve months is one that public health has always recognised. Once we know who is most at risk then we need to find ways to protect those people. It’s not enough to do this indirectly by focussing on abstractions such as the R number. We need to do it directly by focusing on real people in real communities.”
Dr Gail Carson, Head of ISARIC global support centre & Vice Chair of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), University of Oxford, said:
“Today we grieve for all those that have died from COVID-19 and with those who have lost loved ones.
“Tomorrow, we need to focus on trying to prevent new cases, prevent more deaths and prevent more Long Covid. A focus on the early stage of infection is starting to gain traction across various research groups, to understand how best to treat early in infection and prevent stress on the NHS, severe disease and Long Covid from developing. As my friend in the Long Covid Support group reminds me, there is also a need to find management strategies for those already with Long Covid covering the multiple systems it can affect. Once the vaccine programme is complete for this year in the UK, we cannot forget those who are scarred mentally or physically. Long Covid is an international issue and solidarity across countries and researchers will be required for many months to come.”
Dr Simon Clarke, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology, University of Reading, said:
“It doesn’t seem very long since the United Kingdom passed the depressing number of the first 1,000 Covid-19 deaths. Now that we have passed 100,000 deaths, we should reflect on the fact that on average, each death accounts for around 10 years of life lost1,2. We must remember what that actually means for those who’ve lost loved ones, and how we can avoid an even more devastating toll in the future.
“If we’ve learnt anything, it is that locking down late means locking down for longer and losing more lives. While we should not rush to restrict our freedoms unnecessarily, and it is true that breaking the chains of infection will not completely rid us of what now seems like an endemic virus, the numbers of infections, hospitalisations and deaths, runs out of control very quickly.
“While there will inevitably be a strong desire to live our lives as we did before, we risk allowing the virus to get out of control if we don’t deploy enough caution. While vaccines represent our way out of the pandemic, it will be some time before maximum coverage is reached and we must not forget that intensive care units could very easily be filled with working age people. The people currently in hospital were largely infected in a society living under tiered restrictions, a society living a normal life would condemn many more to the same fate.”
1. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75
2. https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2020/05/28/coronavirus-and-lost-life-three-million-years/
Prof Lawrence Young, Virologist and Professor of Molecular Oncology, Warwick Medical School, said:
“This is a grim milestone and we can’t help but look back at where we’ve been and forward to where we are hopefully going. We’ve learnt a lot about the need to act ‘fast and hard’ to limit the spread of virus infection and about the importance of strict control measures. We’ve also seen the tremendous pace of modern science and the value of international collaboration resulting in the most amazing developments in diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. Faced now with the rise of new virus variants we must all remain vigilant, ensure that ‘test, trace and isolate’ is working effectively and continue on the trajectory to get all adults vaccinated by the autumn.”
Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, said:
“In just over one year, there are more than 2 million COVID-19 deaths1 . Within that huge level of mortality, the UK has contributed >100k of those deaths with a death rate of 1454 per million people, one of the worst in the world and higher than the USA or Brazil.
“Public compliance with the guidance has mostly been good, so this is predominantly a failure of governance. Aspects include delayed decision-making when considering lockdowns, an expensive and flawed roll-out of the test and trace programme, a lack of support to help people self-isolate, a border policy for international arrivals that is extremely lax, and policies that encouraged mixing indoors such as the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. Any inquiry into the UK government handling of the COVID-19 pandemic will find there is a lot to scrutinise.”
1. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
Prof Jim Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, and Professor of Structural Biology, University of Oxford, said:
“100,000 deaths within 28 days of covid19 is an awful milestone for the UK. The UK was one of the worst hit countries in the world in the first wave and now has been hit very hard in the second wave. Behind this number are 100, 000 grieving families and many many thousands who are alive but suffering from long term ill effects.
“The nature of the virus, is that number go up quickly but come down slowly. Unfortunately there are thousands more deaths to come.
“In addition, the lockdown is damaging all our lives, especially children, those in hospitality industries, the lonely and the disadvantaged.
“However, without the lockdown, we would have over filled the hospitals and the death rate would have been much higher. The NHS remains under severe stress. In a democracy, politicians have to decide the balance.
“The roll out of the vaccines is impressive and we can be confident that they will transform our current situation. Along with successes in clinical trials, gene sequencing and biomedical science, the UK has led the world in some aspects of fighting covid19.
“However, being hit so hard twice is not simply bad luck. Over, 100,000 deaths reflects a failure that we must learn from. We owe to the families left behind that when the vaccine has brought the virus under control, to identify where we have succeeded, where we have failed and what needs to change.”
Dr Joshua Moon, research fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said:
“The UK’s approach to test and trace has been a key failing throughout the covid-19 pandemic.
“While the UK has produced a relatively rapid rise in the number of tests done per capita, the use of these tests has often been inconsistent and has been poorly managed particularly at a policy level.
“In terms of the testing itself, reliance on self-swabbing and the myriad issues the government has had in setting up a coherent test and trace system has led to problems in cutting chains of transmission.
“On top of this, the UK’s reliance on sick pay for supporting self-isolation and the limited direct support for isolation has created problems for large sections of the population to comply and thus contributed further to transmission.
“Add this to a series of communications missteps, often confusing and conflicting guidance/rules, and a capitulation to short-term economic pressures and you can see how the UK has gotten to where it is.”
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths
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www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
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