In reply to Richard Horn:
> Macron has overseen the deaths of 80,000, is he hateful or mere dislikeful? I think Italy is pretty much on a par with UK in mortality rate so Conte must be really bad? What about Sanchez?
> ... and what would your opinion be of Corbyn hypothetically if he had been PM and assuming (very likely) we still had 100k deaths?
It's absolutely ludicrous to think that Corbyn would caused anything like 100,000 deaths. This level of death has been caused by Boris Johnson's malicious "herd immunity" policy in order to be seen as the saviour of capitalism by carrying on with business as usual in the face of a deadly pandemic.
On 15th March many European countries were going into lockdown while Johnson was just asking the people with CV19 symptoms to voluntarily self isolate. Corbyn wanted to know why Johnsons scientific advice was different to that of every other European country? We eventually locked down on 23rd March. Doubling time of cases was 2-3 days at that time so that 8 days delay in lockdown would have caused the eventual total number of deaths to be 8 times higher than it ended up. The UK death toll from the first wave was about 60,000 so we can say straightaway that Corbyns approach would have reduced that to 7,500 deaths.
In April 2020, Corbyn was drawing attention to the WHO who had told us to "test, test, test". The countries who have successfully handled the pandemic have followed this approach - they locked down early, got cases to very low levels, and kept a lid on the spread by a mass testing programme.
On 10th May, even though case numbers in the community were still quite high, Johnson told employers that there would be a change of emphasis and workers should be actively encouraged to return to work in order to prop up service businesses in city centres. Corbyn said there should be no return to work until safe, people must come before profit. Johnson was forced to reverse this lunacy after case numbers began to rise exponentially again.
In September Corbyn drew attention to the growing number of CV19 outbreaks in schools fuelling the next wave of the epidemic and said that the resulting deaths will be the responsibility of this negligent government.
You can add that if Corbyn had won the 2017 election then the NHS would have had three years to recover from years of Tory underfunding. The NHS was in crisis before the outbreak and the 2017 manifesto had pledged £30 billion in extra funding to make sure the NHS has safe levels of bed occupancy and staffing levels and a properly resourced ambulance service.
However you might want to criticise Corbyn, it's safe to say that 10's of thousands of lives would have been saved by a Corbyn government.
Post edited at 00:38