Britain needs a nimbler health service

The NHS is the beating heart of this country, the prime minister told the nation. Perhaps, but major surgery is needed.

Appreciation is nice; improved infrastructure would be better © Dinendra Haria/LNP/Shutterstock

How is Britain coping?

At this stage, comparing Covid-19 fatalities in different countries, it is not obvious that the UK is doing a strikingly bad job at battling the coronavirus. This week there was much discussion of the fact that the UK’s death toll per million (which was 178 as of Wednesday lunchtime) is a bit more than twice Ireland’s (82). But Ireland’s population density is a quarter of the UK’s, the population is younger and far more rural and it has no massive conurbations or the global hub that is London. Our deaths per million are broadly the same as comparable countries such as the Netherlands (172) and less than half those in Belgium (383). In France, far less densely populated than the UK, the rate is 241.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.