AS Britain assumes the lead in the European coronavirus death race, and following the revelation that the true mortality figures are 50 per cent higher than we thought, the recriminations have begun.

There is a widespread belief that Britain was, at best, slow off the mark, at worst, guided by an ideological conviction that Covid-19 was just another variety of flu and did not require us making changes to the British way of life.

Commentators like Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times say that this has been a crisis for “British exceptionalism”. That the arrogance of this post-imperial country, with its delusions of Global Britain, led the UK elite to ignore the threat of Covid-19 until it was too late.

Many Scottish nationalists feel much the same and say that Scotland has been harnessed to inept policies fashioned by a grossly incompetent Tory clique in Westminster.

If only we could have closed the border with England, they sigh, looking at the way Jacinda Ardern has handled things in New Zealand, where the disease appears to have been stamped out by a total lockdown. At least for now.

Reports that English firms had been declining requests from Scottish care homes for protective gear only confirm the suspicion that Scotland is a low priority, at the back of the queue, an afterthought.

The SNP MP Angus Brendan MacNeil is by no means alone in believing that Scotland would be better “dealing with [our] own problems unfettered..[like]Norway, Ireland”. Many MSPs are saying so privately, and wondering why Nicola Sturgeon is not distancing herself from the “laissez faire” approach of the English Tories.

It was certainly possible that Scotland could have taken a different path to the rest of the UK. Smaller countries like Iceland and Singapore moved faster in locking down against Covid 19. Ireland closed the schools earlier than we did and seems to have been much better at suppressing the disease. Certainly the crude death rate has been around half the UK’s.

But there is a problem: throughout this crisis there has been no significant difference between Ms Sturgeon’s approach to coronavirus and that of the other three nations in the four-nation pandemic alliance. SNP MPs may say that the Scottish Government was press-ganged into backing the UK approach to handling Covid-19 and that her instinct was to go for a much tougher lock down earlier. However, there is no basis for thinking this.

When Leo Varadkar made his dramatic announcement on March 12 closing the schools in Ireland, the First Minister’s response was that this was unnecessary. She said she agreed with her own medical advisers that the disease would likely be spread just as readily by children at home, and that the emergency services would be undermined by parents having to stay at home to look after their kids.

As for testing, this was actually stopped by the Scottish Government in mid March. As the National Clinical Director, Professor Jason Leitch, told Channel 4 on March 16, “community testing and contact-tracing was halted after the containment phase”. The First Minister was fully aware of this. On April 2, standing next to Ms Sturgeon, the then Chief Medical Officer, Dr Catherine Calderwood, said that testing was “a distraction”. This seemed to be a general view among UK medical advisers.

Ms Sturgeon has said that she “followed the science”. This has been the mantra used by ministers like the UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, since this outbreak began. Many commentators regard this as a convenient excuse for incompetence. “Why didn’t they listen to different scientists and the World Health Organisation who were advising countries to test, test, test”?

But Britain has some of the best epidemiologists in the world sitting on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. The UK Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Patrick Vallance, said again yesterday that “I don’t think it is quite right that testing saves lives”. Our medics still believe that tests should be confined to people who have symptoms and to essential workers. Mass testing will only make sense in their view when there is a reliable antibody test – and there isn’t one.

Yet, testing and contact-tracing seems to have worked elsewhere, not just in South Korea, but in Germany where the death rate has been significantly lower. Critics like Professor Devi Sridhar, Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, insist that the Scottish Government could and should have embarked on mass testing, though it’s not clear how it could have found the capacity so to do.

She also claims that Mr Johnson and Ms Sturgeon adopted a “herd immunity” strategy because of “British exceptionalism”. Herd immunity has morphed into an ideological battle-ground, rather than an epidemiological truism.

The problem for politicians like Ms Sturgeon is that they are expected to base their policy on “the science”, listen to the “experts”, and make policy “evidence based”. But as soon as they do so, they are liable to be accused of listening to the wrong kind of scientists.

Epidemiologists take a long view about the progress of a disease through its life-cycle involving several peaks and troughs. They have said from the start that since there is no vaccine, 80 per cent of us are going to get the disease anyway so there is no way of stopping it. That was one of the first remarks Ms Sturgeon made about Covid-19.

It is what the top UK advisers, like Professor Vallance meant when they were talking about herd immunity. In the absence of a vaccine, they believed that the only way the disease would die out would be when most of us were exposed to it. Prof Leitch was adamant on March 16 that : “the alternative – closing the borders and locking everyone down – doesn’t work over a prolonged period.”

That’s as may be, but it now looks as if the politically savvy thing to have done was to ignore all this and go for a panic lockdown to show the voters that you are serious. In politics, doing something is always more appealing than not doing something.

Scientists don’t have to answer to Twitter. The political cycle is not on the same trajectory as this disease, and politicians will get no credit for being right in a couple of years’ time.

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