Covid-19 death toll: where did the UK make mistakes?

You can, of course, quibble with the numbers. And yes, of course, comparing figures with other countries that use different measures is fraught with difficulties. But it doesn’t matter. When the toll by several measures passes 100,000, the conclusion is unavoidable. Something has gone badly wrong. Our first Covid-19 death was on March 5, a septuagenarian woman in Reading. Over the year that followed her fellow Britons had more than twice the likelihood of joining her compared with a German. Or, if you prefer a comparison to a state without the vast healthcare resources of Europe’s economic powerhouse, we had 4,000 times the chance of dying compared with someone from Vietnam. When we went into the first lockdown, 20,000 deaths was considered a good outcome.