LONDON: A new research on Monday showed that Britain’s strategy to slow thespread of the novel coronavirus could lead to up to 70,000 additionaldeaths this year.
Fears are growing that the crisis in Britain is following the same path asthe one currently devastating Italy.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned on Sunday that the health service wouldbe “overwhelmed”.
More than 5,000 cases have been confirmed so far and 281 people have diedfrom COVID-19 in Britain, according to official figures.
The toll mirrors the figures from just two weeks ago in Italy, wherehundreds of people are dying from COVID-19 every day.
Although the government has announced a string of measures aimed atfighting the spread — including closing bars, pubs and restaurants —doctors are warning of an Italy-like situation unless stringent socialdistancing is implemented.
A team of researchers from University College London, the University ofCambridge and Health Data Research UK showed that the current approachcould result in an additional 70,000 deaths.
They examined NHS patient data to determine the proportion of thepopulation who are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 and modelled theprobability of their contracting deadly infections in various scenarios.
They found that 20% of people in Britain were at risk because they wereaged over 70 or had underlying health conditions, from diabetes to heartdisease.
That is more than 13 million people, nearly 600,000 of whom would die thisyear on average — even without a deadly pandemic.
A failure to enforce a temporary lockdown has wasted valuable time and islikely to place unnecessary strain on health workers, resulting inadditional COVID-19 deaths, the authors said.
“All the models we’ve seen so far are not clear about the background riskin terms of co-morbidities, and there’s a gap of not knowing the excessdeaths,” said lead researcher Amitava Banerjee, UCL associate professor inclinical data science.
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“We’ve tried to do that. The 70,000 are scenarios of excess deathsassociated with coronavirus over a year,” he told *AFP*.’Where’s the response?’
While Italy, France and Spain have all enforced near total lockdowns,Britain has taken a more piecemeal approach, not shuttering shops and barsuntil late last week.
Banerjee said that Britain’s current tactics amounted to “partialsuppression” and needed a rapid scaling up.
“We’re all trying to think why we are not doing more in the UK and why arewe waiting for our all-systems blazing response?” he said.
“If we’d moved a week ago, we could have kept the number of cases anddeaths lower.”
Downing Street was forced to deny a “highly defamatory” *Sunday Times*newspaperstory that Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, had initially arguedagainst strict measures to contain the virus, in an argument summed up as”if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.
Banerjee pointed to how China successfully managed to contain the virus viaextreme social distancing after an initial explosion in cases.
“We were slow to move from mitigation to partial suppression, compared toother countries but also our own data. We know we’re underestimating andit’s going up every day,” he said.
“We seem to be presenting the idea that we (in Britain) are exceptional.”
