Having initially joined the European Union as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ – as Britain’s dire financial straits were characterised throughout the 1960s and 70s – the metaphor of a diseased nation has turned into a cold, hard clinical reality as Britain prepares to leave the EU this winter.
Boris Johnson’s announcement on Saturday of tier four restrictions for London and the south-east and stricter Christmas gatherings due to a much more infectious variant of the Coronavirus spreading through the population triggered the closing of many borders in Europe and beyond to British travellers. Days from Christmas and Brexit, Britain is cut off. The end of free movement has arrived and the dreams of a self-isolating nation longed for by Brexiters have been achieved.
Johnson’s announcement may have been sudden, but the British Government’s laissez faire attitude to lockdowns, poor tracking and tracing and its late ramping-up of testing – infused with a deadly exceptionalism – always ran this risk.
While you can’t sing Rule Britannia to a virus, as Musa Okwonga observed early on in these pages, this is precisely what Boris Johnson and his Brexiters saw fit to do by citing our ‘world-beating’ innovations.
It now seems that the virus did listen to the absurd siren calls of an Empire ruling the waves – and took advantage of the combination of arrogance and ignorance.
Beyond Exceptional: The Etonian English Imperialism at the Heart of a Deadly COVID-19 Crisis
With one of the highest Coronavirus death rates in the world, the UK has proven itself to be exceptional. But its problems go beyond shallow notions of complacency and are rooted in deep-seated structural and cultural oppression
Herded Out of Immunity
The more the Coronavirus was allowed to run riot through Britain’s densely populated and highly mobile regions, the more likely an adaptive mutation was to occur.
The highly infectious new variant – one of thousands – was initially sampled in September when it was named ‘Variant B.1.1.7’. However, it wasn’t deemed significant enough to be tracked until late October and a full investigation into its genomic sequencing began in early December under the name ‘VUI-202012-01’.
According to a report on Sunday by the Government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, it “demonstrated exponential growth during a period when lockdown measures were in place”. By the second week of December, more than 60% of all cases in London were ascribed to the new variant and around half of all cases in the south-east.
Though there is no sign that this variant is more deadly, the rate of mutation has taken scientists by surprise. Of the 23 mutations, 17 were acquired all at once. This variant could have arisen in a chronically infected patient undergoing antibody therapy, but there are also reports that the prison system in Kent was a catalyst for the rise of infections.
Whether the source was Britain’s overstretched, underfunded and dehumanising prison system or not, the reality of neglect and negligence in Johnson’s Coronavirus response made some such mutation mathematically much more likely.
