They got it right in Germany in 2020 – and in Canterbury 80 years ago – so why didn’t Boris Johnson learn this lesson?

Well-funded local authorities would have done a much better job than central government in handling the pandemic – and saved more lives. Look at how Canterbury survived the Blitz, explains Patrick Cockburn

Locals who lost their homes after an air raid on Canterbury receive a helping hand from the army (Getty)

The struggle against Covid-19 is often compared to fighting a war against a human enemy such as Germany in the Second World War. The purpose of the analogy is a morale-boosting trumpet call for the British people to show the same degree of solidarity and determination in 2020 as they did 1940-41. Rally-round-the-flag rhetoric like this inevitably contains a hefty dollop of bombast, but cynicism should not be carried too far because a genuine comparison between now and then is both possible and revealing. The most useful comparison is not about national character of the “Britain can take it” type, but between the different ways in which government and society organised themselves to face cataclysmic crises 80 years apart.

More specifically, it is worth comparing “the Blitz”, the mass German air attacks on civilian targets between September 1940 and May 1941, with the governmental and popular response to the Covid-19 epidemic since the first fatality on 5 March. The number of officially recorded deaths is coincidentally much the same in both emergencies, though they differ in length. Some 43,500 civilians died in the Blitz compared to 40,500 in the Covid-19 epidemic at the time of writing, though the figure of excess deaths is much higher at 63,500, most of which are Covid-related. One feature of the death toll is striking: the number who died in the Blitz was much lower than the government’s scientists forecast while the number of Covid-19 deaths has been much higher than predicted.