By Ben Kerrigan-
The head of the EU’s agency for disease control has warned that Britain is one of five European countries failing to reduce active coronavirus infections
Andrea Ammon,(pictured) the director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said that the UK was trailing the majority of European countries in combating the disease. In evidence to the European parliament’s committee on public health, Ammon said Europe as a whole appeared to have passed the peak of infections on Saturday, with only Bulgaria still experiencing an increase in cases of infection. Aamon told MEPs that the UK, along with Poland, Romania and Sweden, stood out as showing “no substantial changes in the last 14 days”.
“All the others, we really see this substantial decrease,” Ammon said of the cumulative incidence rate, which provides a measure of the prevalence of active cases in the population. She did not offer any explanation of the differences. The ECDC, which monitors all 27 EU member states plus the UK, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland, reported that as of Monday there had been 1.2 million confirmed cases of infection, with 136,347 deaths within the territory it monitors.
The UK has recently recorded 186,599 confirmed cases and 28,466 fatalities, according to the ECDC’s latest data. There has been a decrease of around 13% in the the number of people with Covid-19 in UK hospitals. There has also been a decrease in the number of deaths. Countries are being assessed on the basis of the number of excess deaths during the pandemic period, as opposed to just focusing on the number of people that have died of Covid-19
Excess deaths in the Uk analysed by an EU backed project during the pandemic reported that England had seen the highest rise in deaths over the five-year average compared with Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Questions have been raging about why the deaths have been so high in the Uk, Many blame the delay in implementing the lackdown, after Boris Johnson’s government preferred a herd immunity as the best way to address the virus. Projections of extremely high deaths eventually triggered an abrupt lockdown decision in the Uk in March 23, when Johnson gave the British public a ”simple instruction to stay at home.