Over the most recent recorded 7 day period, the UK has suffered the world's second highest rate of Covid-19 deaths/million. Considerably worse even than the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

Why is our death rate so high? Because we have an incompetent, irresponsible government, without a clear strategy, constantly surprised by events, that put more effort into enriching its chums than into crushing the disease.

It handed crucial tasks to profiteers and appointed unqualified people to highly sensitive roles (eg head of test and trace). Even to this day - and this is the crucial fact - it has *no plan* for ending the pandemic. Just a string of reactive, disconnected policies.

So we have the worst of both worlds: a public health catastrophe and a social and economic catastrophe. Taiwan has twice our population density. But, without any lockdowns, has had just 7 deaths. How? Through a genuinely world-beating test, trade, isolate and support programme.

This is the key: you make sure test, trace, isolate and support is rock solid. No weak links, everyone fully engaged, led by experienced local health teams. Instead, it put a bunch of dilettantes in charge and outsourced the tasks to profit-driven corporations.

£22bn has been poured into this pathetic sham of a programme, and it hasn't even touched the sides. The government might as well have stacked up the money and set light to it. And there is *still no plan* for sorting out this humungous, worldclass mess.

Conclusion? The ideology of privatisation and the vast profits being creamed by its chums are more important to the government than suppressing the virus and ending our national nightmare. This catastrophe is driven by a lethal combination of ideology, corruption and incompetence

Judging by responses to this thread, some people still seem to believe there's a pay-off between our death rate and getting economic and social life "back to normal". So, where's the pay-off? What have we gained from these world-beating failures to contain the virus?

We're in a third lockdown BECAUSE the government failed, repeatedly, to take decisive and timely action to suppress the pandemic. Neither public health nor social life nor economic life are served by this serial incompetence. Why is this hard to understand?

Oh yes, I forgot.

* Card by @LuiseValentiner