On New Year’s eve hundreds protestors gathered around St Thomas’ hospital in Westminster and chanted ‘COVID is a hoax’.
The event went viral after a video was posted of the objectors, gathered in large numbers, without a mask and evidently drunk. This caused an uproar of anger from people around the UK as the hospital was treating sick patients who were suffering from COVID-19. The man who recorded the video, Dr Lee, had just finished his new year’s eve shift. He came across this group of people and couldn’t comprehend why part of the population still don’t ‘realise the seriousness of the pandemic’. It is also known that many of the protesters were COVID-19 conspiracy theorists.
Timing of this didn’t fit well with the current situation the UK finds itself in, with a 3rd national lockdown beginning. The footage appeared after there were a record high 53,285 COVID-19 cases in the UK, the fourth day in a row that the UK suffered over 50,000 positive cases. Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan took to twitter to describe his thoughts on the incident by saying ‘this is disgusting. These morons shame Britain’. Local resident Laura Hawksworth dubbed it ‘incredibly sad that people can be callous and insulting to sick patients, their families and health care workers. This is not a laughing matter’. This worrying development raises the question whether the UK grasping the seriousness of the situation that it’s in and whether the population at large will follow lockdown rules, unite and support their key workers?
