The Guardian view on Britain's pandemic record: a monument to failure | Editorial

The terrible scale of the tragedy cannot be attributed to misfortune. It is a product of negligent government

In Soho, central London, stands a replica of a 19th-century public water pump without a handle. The missing part is not a result of vandalism but a tribute to John Snow, the physician who correctly surmised that the pump, supplying contaminated water, was a super-spreading device for cholera. Snow mapped case data and lobbied the local parish authorities for the pump's deactivation.

The coronavirus is a different kind of pathogen (cholera is a bacterial infection), but our understanding of today's pandemic owes a debt to Snow's methods. Boris Johnson and his ministers claim to have been led by science over the past year, and mostly they have, but often too late, as well as grudgingly and inconsistently. When evidence has clashed with ideology, the latter has frequently prevailed. Mr Johnson's fear of upsetting Tory MPs has often seemed stronger than his care for good public health policy.