A leading British professor who had predicted coronavirus type outbreak two years ago slammed the United Kingdom’s (UK) government for lack of ‘decisive action’ and ‘slow’ response.
Lashing out at the government, Devi Sridhar, 35, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, said that the authorities missed several opportunities to contain the pandemic.
In May 2018, Sridhar had made the prediction to an audience at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, and said that a farmer in China would get infected by an animal, that infection would then spread to the local community before getting on a plane and hitting the UK.
She said that we ‘should not have been this surprised’ by the spread of the virus. Her remarks at the Hay Festival were shared to Twitter last week, with people praising her insight, Mail Online reported.
During a discussion of government preparedness for serious health threats, she said: ‘The largest threat to the UK population is someone in China who has been infected from an animal.
‘Then they get on a plane to the UK. What good is it for the UK to be worried [only] about what’s happening here? It’s about those interconnections across the world. If you want to solve those problems, you can’t do it on a go-alone approach.’
After the clip of her analysis spread through Twitter, Ms Sridhar took to social media to discuss how Boris Johnson’s government have been handling the crisis.
She said: ‘I hope I’m not being overly critical but this is not the first virus to emerge from this kind of setting and many things have been done in a way they should not have been done. We should not have been this surprised.’
Lambasting the government response, on Thursday she highlighted how scientists were confused by its advice.
She said: ‘I still don’t fully understand who the government is listening to and what is the goal.’
The professor also highlighted what she sees as several missed opportunities to contain the virus in the UK.
She said the first opportunity was in late January when The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, published an account of the treatment of coronavirus patients in Wuhan.
This, she said, was the signal for the UK to get testing ready and in place.
Ms Sridhar said the WHO mission report from February 24 was the next big missed opportunity.
That said that the impending pandemic was ‘extremely dangerous’ and that China had resorted to ‘the most ambitious . . . agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history’.
Ms Sridhar said that this should have pushed the UK to run simulations to estimate how the virus would have affected the country.
In a tweet, she said : ‘It makes me feel nauseous how little action was taken early on. Academic navel-gazing and political in-fighting instead of bold decisive action.’
The professor said the UK’s slow action had led to the country being behind in the battle against the virus.
It comes as Britain’s coronavirus death toll jumped to match the number of fatalities recorded in Italy two weeks ago, fanning fears the UK is just a fortnight away from being plunged into a comparable crisis.
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