Opinion: There will be no winners in UK's coronavirus blame game

It’s human nature to lash out when lined up, fairly orunfairly,as the fall guy, yet the sight of mutual recriminations breaking out is downright alarming for a general public still wondering whether it’s safe to leave the house. ____________________________________________________ More on coronavirus: ____________________________________________________ So this week’s intervention from the Commons science and technology committee, which has spent weeks interrogating the key players by video link, is both timely and welcome in painting a more nuanced picture of what went wrong. Its letter to ministers zeroes in on the decision back in March to stop testing for coronavirus in the community and focus on hospital patients,which it correctly describes as “one of the most consequential made” in the crisis. After ordering pubs, bars, restaurants, theatres, gyms and leisure centres across the country to close indefinitely, Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the public on March23; outlining strict exercise and shopping limits, ordering all shops other than food stores and pharmacies to close, and implementing a ban on public gatherings of two or more people.FirstSecretary of State Dominic Raab, while deputising for Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he recovered from coronavirus (COVID-19), announced on April 16 that the U.K. lockdownwouldcontinuefor at least another three weeks. On May 10, the government then released preliminary guidelines on how the country is to exit the lockdown while setting out plans foratentativeeasing onsocial restrictions in the coming months. As the U.K. lockdown begins to lift and some groups return to work while following social distancing guidelines, we look at the situation around the country in pictures.  (Pictured) A pedestrian wearing personal protective equipment takes a photograph from the Millennium Bridge, near St Paul's Cathedral in central London, England on May 13, as people start to return to work after lockdown restrictions were eased slightly.  Workers wearing personal protective equipment unload boxes of disposable gloves from an aircraft, after it landed its cargo of 10 million pairs of gloves at Bournemouth Airport in southern England on May 6. A rise in the popularity of baking during the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown appears to have caused many major supermarkets across the UK to suffer a shortage of flour in recent weeks. Over 125,000 birthday cards were sent to Captain Tom Moore, who raised over £30 million by walking 100 laps of his 25 metre (82 feet) garden before his 100th birthday, which were organised in the Great Hall of the temporarily-closed Bedford School in Bedford, England on April 28.   NHS workers hold a minute's silence outside the main entrance of Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, England on April 28. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warned the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic could see the U.K. economy shrink by a record 35 percent by June.  A man wears a religious placard on Market Street in Manchester, England on March 25.  Workers sell food and household items to local residents from their ice cream van at a supported housing estate in west Belfast, Northern Ireland on April 1. Soldiers and private contractors help to prepare the ExCel centre in London, which is being made into the temporary NHS Nightingale hospital comprising two wards, each of 2,000 people, to help tackle coronavirus, on March 30.  Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives a press conference on the ongoing situation with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic with chief medical officer Chris Whitty (L) and Chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance (R) in Downing Street after he had taken part in the government's emergency Cobra meeting in London, England on March 16. Yet the committee identifies Public Health England as the slipperiest customer here, pointing out that nearly two months after it promised to show MPs the evidence on which the decision to stop community testing was based, it still hasn’t done so. Greg Clark, the mild-mannered former Tory minister who chairs the committee, has openly argued thatthedecision was driven less by scientific considerations than by PHE’s lack of in-house capacity to carry out anything like enough tests and reluctance to accept help from an untriednetworkofoutside labs.

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