UK takes tougher stance to com­bat coro­n­avirus, as pre­vi­ous ap­proach risks hun­dreds of thou­sands of lives — study

On Thurs­day, the UK gov­ern­ment told cit­i­zens to self-iso­late if they were ex­pe­ri­enc­ing mild coro­n­avirus symp­toms, but that it would do more harm than good to im­pose dras­tic mea­sures such as im­ple­ment­ing a strin­gent so­cial dis­tanc­ing pol­i­cy, in stark con­trast to its neigh­bors Italy, Spain and France.

In a dra­mat­ic re­ver­sal, Boris John­son and his sci­ence ad­vi­sors took to the stage on Mon­day and ef­fec­tive­ly said we can­not keep calm and car­ry on — Britons were asked to cease all non-es­sen­tial con­tact, stop go­ing to of­fices or vis­it pubs, the­atres, and oth­er so­cial venues. The big rea­son be­hind this tougher stance was at­trib­uted to a study from Im­pe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don, which found that the pre­vi­ous ap­proach could have killed 250,000 peo­ple in the UK and over­whelmed the Na­tion­al Health Ser­vice (NHS).

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