Even now, polls show the public are more likely to blame each other than the government for the UK’s pandemic catastrophe.
You are browsing in private mode. To enjoy all the benefits of our website LOG IN or Create an Account The human mind struggles to understand large numbers. We can count groups of up to four or five, and perhaps tell the difference between dozens and hundreds, at a glance. Beyond that, though, it’s just “lots”. The ancient Greeks built their entire civilisation without even having a word for numbers bigger than “myriad”: that meant only 10,000. Ten times that many Britons have now died of Covid-19: a number literally inconceivable. Since the start of 2020, around one in every 678 people who live in this country has died from the pandemic, a list of casualties larger than the entire population of places such as Watford or Lincoln. The list of the dead would fill the pages of one of the later Harry Potter novels; it would take more than a day to read all the names out loud. It is uncomfortably difficult to find historic horrors on this scale. It is nearly 30 times the entire death toll from the Troubles. It’s a much closer thing, but Covid has likely killed more people in the UK than the Great Plague of 1665-66, too. Since Queen Victoria came to the throne, the only events with higher British death tolls are the two World Wars, the Spanish flu, and another flu pandemic in the early 1890s. As the pandemic is still raging, the latter is all but certain to be overtaken. “It’s hard to compute the sorrow contained in that grim statistic,” Boris Johnson said on Tuesday (26 January), shortly after the passing of the 100,000 milestone was announced.
