Poor track and trace system led to UK's bad response to pandemic, reports show
17 June 2020, 18:12 | Updated: 17 June 2020, 18:29
Lack of a proper track and trace system led to UK's bad Covid-19 response
A report showed the UK to have one of the worst coronavirus responses in the world.
Ana Nicholls is the Director of Industry Operations at the Economist Intelligence Unit and she was speaking to Shelagh Fogarty amid a report scoring the UK very low in its response to coronavirus.
"As we knew in a sense from the South Korean model, test track and trace was so successful there" Shelagh said, to which Ms Nicholls told her that "by and large countries that are islands did particularly well" in the EIU report. It is a "much easier task to make sure that you keep on top of cases" she added.
Shelagh was unsure with the evaluations of Ms Nicholls, wondering "we're an island and it didn't apply, did it?"
"There are much more points of entry and London is such a global city theres quite a high chance the disease was here early" she argued.
The director went further, revealing that "we didn't necessarily keep on top of tracking and testing and keeping track of the cases as they were coming in" which was ultimately the downfall of our response.
This, coupled with a "high obesity rate, not the highest, but relatively high for the EU and we have a relatively high density of population within London" were reasons why the UK scored so poorly in the report.
"I think the bigger issue though in the UK was the care homes" Ms Nicholls stated, adding that there perhaps was too much focus being put on the NHS and hospital settings rather than care homes, which was the downfall in the scoring of other countries, such as Sweden.
Listen & subscribe: Global Player | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify
