Former Johnson adviser named three main mistakes in the fight against COVID-19

The UK would have been better able to handle the pandemic if its authorities had responded earlier to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic . This was during a hearing in the British Parliament on Wednesday, May 26, said former adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson Dominic Cummings. According to him, Britain should have taken more decisive action in the winter of 2020, but the government did not have a strategy for how to deal with the pandemic. A former adviser to Johnson and one of the main strategists of the campaign to leave the EU called three main reasons why the authorities in London failed to contain the pandemic.

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In February 2020, Boris Johnson was confident that COVID-19 would not be more dangerous than swine flu, and joked that his health adviser could inject him with the virus live on television, Cummings told British MPs. He noted that he tried to warn Johnson about the likely large-scale consequences of the pandemic, but he did not succeed. “I should have sounded the alarm [in February], but I, like most, was convinced by the reaction of the WHO and the attitude towards what is happening inside [Britain],” he admitted. As a result, Cummings and Johnson's advisers on health and data analysis convinced the prime minister to enter quarantine only on March 12. The Prime Minister announced the lockdown on 16 March.

Cummings apologized for the government's failure to respond more confidently to the COVID-19 crisis. “The entire government and 10 Downing Street (the address of the prime minister’s residence. ) were not on alert in February [2020], many dignitaries were literally skiing in general,” he lamented. Johnson's former adviser also said that neither he nor his former boss are truly smart people and should not have held high positions in government. Cummings called such a situation "crazy", which raises the question of the effectiveness of the entire political system in the country. At the same time, he said that developing a strategy to combat the pandemic is a very difficult task and there are no guarantees that even more capable leaders could cope with it, given the lack of resources and competent personnel. “Even if Bill Gates or one of the other most competent people on the planet were to drive into 10 Downing Street, he would still find it an absolute nightmare,” Cummings said. He served as an adviser to the prime minister from July 2019 to November 2020 and resigned after a series of scandals, in particular, he was accused of non-compliance with quarantine measures.

As of May 26, 4.5 million people were infected with COVID-19 in Britain, the number of deaths from the virus is 128 thousand, follows from the data of the statistical portal Our World in Data. More deaths than in Britain were recorded in the USA (590 thousand), Brazil (452 ​​thousand), India (307 thousand), Mexico (222 thousand).