LONDON (UK) – As the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 death toll approaches 100,000, Home Secretary Priti Patel said on Wednesday that the numbers were horrendous, however, that it was not the time to retrospect about the government’s likely mismanagement of the crisis.
The United Kingdom’s official death toll is 91,470, which Europe’s worst figure and the world’s fifth worst after the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has often been criticised for reacting too slowly to the crisis.
Patel told LBC when asked why the death toll was so large. “”Every single death is deeply tragic. There’s no one factor as to why we have such a horrendous and tragic death rate.”
“I don’t think this is the time to talk about mismanagement,” Patel said when asked by the BBC if the government had mismanaged the crisis.
When pressed on the international comparisons of death tolls, Patel told LBC the data was “not comparable”.
British ministers say that while they have not got everything right, they have learned from mistakes and followed scientific advice.
Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, told Sky: “We will have got some things right and some things wrong and we’ve learnt a lot as we’ve gone through this.”
“The lesson is go earlier than you think you want to, go a bit harder than you think you want to, and go a bit broader than you think you want to in terms of applying the restrictions.”
Currently 37,946 people are in hospital with COVID, and 3,916 out of them are on ventilation.
Vallance said, “It’s worth remembering the definition of insanity by Einstein which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting for a different outcome.”
“The lesson is every time you release it too quickly you get an upswing and you can see that right across the world.”
Patel said the COVID-19 death toll and the extent to which hospital admissions have been happening means it is premature to speculate about when the lockdown may be lifted or eased.
“We are still in a perilous situation,” she told Sky. “We have a long way to go.”