COVID-19 Has Killed More Than 100,000 in Britain. Why Is the Fatality Rate So High?

The United Kingdom passed the grim milestone of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday, only the fifth country to record a six-figure death toll, and by far the smallest. With the entire country still under a national lockdown to slow the spread of the virus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Tuesday it was “hard to compute the sorrow” of the statistic in a national address, and offered his “deepest condolences to anyone who has lost a loved one.” Half of the more than 100,000 deaths in the U.K. have come since November, when the virus, which reached low levels in the population over the summer, began spreading with renewed speed. In December, scientists identified a new variant of the virus in the U.K. that was up to 70% more transmissible. On Jan. 22, Johnson said that variant could be up to 30% more deadly, too. Read more: ‘It’s Unimaginably Bad.’ How Government Failures and the New COVID-19 Variant Are Pushing the U.K.’s Health System Into Crisis The U.K.’s death toll is lower than the U.S.’s 425,000, but its population is only one-fifth of the size of America’s and its per capita death rate is higher by nearly 13%, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The only countries in the world that are worse affected than the U.K. in terms of per capita death rate are the small European nations of San Marino, Belgium and Slovenia. Prime Minister Johnson said that the U.K. government “did everything we ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Londontime United Kingdom Source Type: news