Britain is the global Typhoid Mary
By: Katy Preen
Tags: Coronavirus, Global Health, Uk News, Public Health, Covid 19

Britain is the global Typhoid Mary

Do you remember at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the leader of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that containing the disease was the priority, and that nations should “do everything they can to stop transmission”?

Well, Britain had its own ideas. The deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries, said that Britain stopped testing travellers on arrival at Britain’s airports because “there comes a point in a pandemic where that is not an appropriate intervention” (not sure what that even means), and also implied that the WHO’s advice on testing was meant for other, poorer countries.

It turns out that Britain absolutely should have been doing what other, poorer countries were doing as we now have one of the world’s highest death rates from Covid, and we still haven’t sorted out our testing programme 10 months later. Other places have put the disease behind them and have returned to normal. We’re just getting started.

And now, as we head into Winter, the virus is gathering pace. The UK’s R-number has moved above 1, indicating exponential spread of the disease. It’s thought to have been driven by a new, more infectious strain of Covid, although some are claiming that the government is hiding behind the new variant to cover for its own deadly mistakes and the looming no-deal Brexit which is already causing chaos at UK ports and distribution centres.

Yesterday, London and the South -East were elevated to the new ‘Tier 4’ (I thought there were only three tiers in the lockdown, but I guess we just invented a new one). This meant no travel in or out of the region… as of midnight. So of course, there was a great exodus of potential superspreaders going home for Christmas yesterday evening.

What could possibly go wrong with thousands of people all cramming on to trains and planes in a 4 to 6-hour window during a pandemic, from the worst affected region, with a new and not properly understood strain of the disease going around? We’ll see the results about 2 weeks from now.

But other countries aren’t taking any chances. European nations were the first to ban travel from the UK, in particular shutting down the Dover-Calais route into France. There are now more than 40 nations with a travel ban from Plague Island, meaning there is effectively a big wall around Britain stopping us from getting out.

Which is funny because the Brexit problems started this week as a result of retailers stockpiling in advance of a No-Deal Brexit (which we’re still on course for, for some reason). And then they stopped the freight trains and ferries out of Dover, and Kent is now a giant car park. At least it’ll stop people leaving and spreading their germs, I guess.

The new strain first appeared here in September, and it was responsible for more than a quarter of November’s infections. The sudden increase in cases from this one strain, mostly in the South-East of England, made the government sit up and pay attention (finally!) this week, and it seems they’re actually taking it seriously. Only 10 months too late, no rush.

Thinking back to Jenny Harries’s comments; “the clue for WHO is in its title. It is a World Health Organisation”, it highlights another flaw in the UK’s ‘do nothing’ strategy. The WHO needs every nation to collaborate on eliminating this disease because, among other things, it could mutate into a worse form.

By allowing the virus to run through our population, remaining present and transmissible for the full 10 months since the disease arrived, we’ve created an undisturbed petri dish for the disease to morph into new and interesting versions. If we’d had a proper lockdown at the start, it wouldn’t have had the chance.

Other countries don’t want our germs, and I’m not surprised. Britain has been a huge risk to the global population’s health, simply by maintaining a reservoir of the disease. Now that our inaction has yielded a new strain, we are even more of a danger.

Britain chose to do nothing, and it had unforseen (although was it really?) consequences. Just like Typhoid Mary, we chose to carry on as normal even though we knew we were infectious. And now we all have to suffer the consequences.