100,000 losses, millions in grief…who is to blame?

Covid19 and its impact on the UK — who can we blame?

Yesterday marked a terrible milestone in this global pandemic, the UK’s death toll passed 100,000 — by the time you read this hundreds more will have died and that toll will continue to rise.

At the time of writing the UK has the fifth highest death toll in the world and the highest in Europe and the blame game is gaining pace every single day. The noise and the clamour gets louder and louder.

For me, the sadness of millions in the UK and globally in grief is what I feel. Where the darkness of having lost a loved one is so consuming that these arguments can seem irrelevant and trite — until later when we all look to understand ‘why?’. How can we assign meaning to lives so cruelly lost to Covid19 in this war we’re all part of?

I do think we need to consider why the UK has been so badly hit and to learn from it over time. It’s the least we owe those who have died from a virus which ended their lives sooner than expected.

I’m saying this as someone who has suffered loss in my life and seen it up close, loss which was sudden and unexpected — and also as someone who has not agreed with lockdown in the UK because of its terrible economic impact, though I have obeyed the ‘rules’.

Much of the blame is laid at the door of the current UK Conservative government and I…