 the consequence of Boris Johnson's late lockdown is that the UK currently has the highest death rate in the world. Now, as you can see here in the seven days up to the 17th of January, for every million people that live in the UK, 16.5 people have died on average every day. Now you'll note because this is up to the 17th of January. This was before the previous two, you know, the last two record-breaking days we've had. So presumably this will be higher now. You can see we're above every other country in the world. Now this is a record which should shame this government. But when grilled about the figures on ITV this morning, Home Secretary Preeti Patel refused to accept that the government had any responsibility at all for the human disaster currently afflicting Britain. Can you explain to me why we have currently the worst death rate in the world? Well, I think we have to put much of this into context. I mean, every single death is just deeply tragic. And this pandemic has affected and blighted all our lives and there are too many families that have lost loved ones. Now, if I may, I don't think there is one single factor or cause as to why so many people have died in the United Kingdom and why we've seen so much in terms of pressures in the NHS. There'll be a range of reasons as to why the numbers are so high, including people, patients with comorbidities, certain ethnicities that are more susceptible to coronavirus. And we've seen this repeatedly, you know, people. But these are issues, Home Secretary, if I may jump in, these are issues which of course are relevant to most other countries in the world. They also have comorbidity issues. They have mixed populations and so on. They don't seem to meet unique issues for the UK. And I simply, I just would like to know whether the government has worked out why we currently have the worst death threat in the world, why we're seeing these scary numbers of people dying when this is not happening in most other places in the world. What is it that we're doing wrong? Well, we don't know that it's not happening. I mean, the way we record data differs from other countries. So I think, you know, we just put it in that context. So that chart is wrong, is it, when it has a set of tasks? I'm not saying the chart is wrong. We all record death data and, you know, coronavirus data very differently. We use O&S as our method of collecting data and that gets published in a way in which many other countries don't publish their data. But I think, look, we are in a terrible, terrible situation with the pandemic and also the number of people that have tragically died. There is a lot that I think we can reflect upon, look back upon. Pretty good to tell they're asked why the death rate in this country was quite so high. She first says, oh, maybe it's because of comorbidities and ethnic minorities, clearly not wanting to point to government policy, a late lockdown, for example. Then when she's pressed on that, she says, oh, maybe the data isn't real. Maybe what you're showing me is just a quirk in the data. Now, Sonia Addisara, I want to bring you back in as someone who's been working on the front line who's experienced much more of this tragedy than Pretty Patel is and also as a doctor, someone who has much more medical knowledge than Pretty Patel does. What did you make of that answer? Okay, so the reason why we have 100,000 deaths in this country versus countries like South Korea that have 1,000 deaths is not because we have ethnic minorities and it's not because we are counting the data wrongly. It's because we have an incompetent government who have failed to learn their mistakes, who ignore experts, who've ignored what front-line workers have been saying and repeatedly have failed to act until it's too late. I literally was so angry watching that and we've seen this, you know, the current throughout this pandemic, the government refusing to actually apologise for their mistakes, apologise for this horrendous death toll and then going on to the media to blame the public. And actually, well done, Piers Morgan for calling that out, because I think too much of the media has just been falling for this narrative that it's somehow, you know, the public's fault that we have, you know, the worst death toll in the world and actually we know that it's a result of this government's policies and their failings that we are suffering such huge death rates. You know, I told you about that, you know, a horrendous shift that I did just before Christmas when we ran out of non-invasive ventilators in my hospital and I was thinking those patients who were getting admitted then, this was just before Christmas, they would have caught the virus a few weeks earlier at the time when we know our shopping centres were full, you know, Oxford Street was full because Boris Johnson was telling people that we were going to have a merry Christmas, like they keep making mistakes. You know, again, I remember just a few weeks ago, you know, Boris Johnson, he on Sunday told parents to send their kids to school at a time when rates of the virus were soaring out of control at a time when our hospitals were literally at a breaking point and then kids went and mixed at school for a day before obviously having to go into lockdown. So it's just been mistake after mistake after mistake by this government and they should have the integrity to apologise for their mistakes and not scapegoat the public or ethnic minorities for this just horrendous death toll that we're experiencing right now. We talk a lot about, you know, disastrous interviews by cabinet ministers on this programme, but there was something about that discussion there between Preeti Patel and Piers Morgan. It was kind of just the callousness, you know, talking about this death toll just like it was any other political problem to be swatted aside. Yeah, yeah, but at least when you see Matt Hancock lie, at least you can see there's a sort of ounce of shame when he does it with Preeti Patel, it's just brazen, you know, it's like she doesn't care, I know I'm lying and I know that what's happened is terrible but I don't really care. And I think the most concerning thing for me is that she is essentially appealing and people are using this word a lot. She's essentially appealing to a conspiracy theory. Oh, well, the reason why it looks particularly bad is because we record our data differently to everybody else, Britain has the best data in the world. If everybody was good at collecting their data as we are, then, you know, we wouldn't look anywhere near as bad. It's actually, it's a, you know, it's a success that we're recording so many deaths. I mean, it's horrific when you think about it. But what's most worrying about that conspiracy theory, which is what it is, is that we therefore don't have the basis by which to judge how we can do better next time. You know, if we aren't going to accept that we've had 1,800 deaths today, which is more than I think 55 times the number of deaths that Vietnam has had in the last 12 months in one day, if we're not going to accept the reality of that, then how are we going to say, well, we can learn this from those guys, or we can learn that from somewhere in the EU or, you know, this from somewhere in Southeast Asia. We have to have an honest appraisal of the facts to ensure this doesn't happen again. And in the absence of that appraisal, then my worst fear is that the next time there's a pandemic, we're not going to deal with it any better. You know, the reason why the Southeast Asian countries have dealt with this so well is because they had SARS in 2003. And 2003 of all the countries Vietnam was declared the first to be SARS-free by the World Health Organization. And after that, they adopted and iterated and innovated different ways of ensuring that any future pandemic would be met with a really, really effective response. We cannot do that if we have politicians effectively denying that we've not done any worse than other countries elsewhere. That's what terrifies me the most. You know, you've talked about how, you know, you know that this is the government's fault, not the fault of the public, and not even the fault of the actions. I mean, Pretty Patel is saying it's the fault of the immutable characteristics of the public. But when you ask, when you go, for example, ask the general population who they most blame for the third wave, it does disappointingly come out sort of 70% are blaming the public and 30% are blaming the government. And, you know, as someone who's working in a hospital, is working with medical staff every day. Do you think doctors and nurses in general have a very different perspective to the public on this? Do you sort of encounter people in hospital who are working on the wards and who are saying, you know, this is so horrific that all of these people are dying if only the public could follow the rules? Or do you mainly hear if only the government hadn't, you know, dragged their feet for so long? I think you hear a mixture. You know, something I've heard quite a lot over the past couple of weeks is people getting frustrated how busy the roads are during wash hour and how busy our buses are and our trains are during wash hour. And staff are complaining about that. But, you know, to me, that's the government's fault. You know, why is it that people are still being felt feel like they have to go into work and people are forced to go into work. We know why that is because people have such low incomes in this country. And people haven't been given the financial support to isolate. So, you know, and actually my sister works in general practice and something that she comes across often and she gets frustrated by is that she'll come across patients who she tells them that they need to isolate and they tell her that they can't and because they can't afford to. That's not their fault. That's this government's fault. And again, the government have been told about this again and again and again that people do not have enough financial support to isolate properly. And again, they haven't learned from other countries, as Alan said, that if you provide people proper support that we can get people to isolate and stop the transmission of this virus. And I think I would just reiterate what Alan's saying that they're continuing to not learn lessons and not learn about the mistakes that they made. So, you know, in the summer at a time when we should have been thinking about how we can eliminate this virus and how we can secure our borders. Instead, we had, you know, being paid to eat out. We also had the telegraph filling out pages saying telling people to go back to work. And again, we already hear them making those same mistakes. You know, over the weekend, we saw in the newspapers government talking about how we're trying to release the restrictions at a time when rates of the virus are going up and at a time our hospitals are being overloaded. So, we just don't seem to get the message that we need to eliminate this virus. It doesn't just affect the elderly, it affects people of all ages. And, you know, we know that I think we think about 10% of people will have long-term symptoms from this virus. So, they are not learning the lessons and it's it's infuriating. I don't know what else we can do now at this point apart from, yeah, just scream. You know, it's quite personal to me. This week we had, you know, a colleague of mine pass away. I also had two members of my family pass away. And it's just, it's just, it's frustrating that we sort of, you know, we're a little 10 months down the line. And it feels like we're just having the same conversations over and over and over again. We know what we need to do to stop this, to suppress this virus. Other countries have done it. And I really just wish our government could get a grip and implement the policies that we need to save people's lives.