Britain's tougher action comes amid fears it has come too late

British MPs are due to grant their government further powers to punish citizens defying orders to remain in their homes and disperse any public gatherings, in a last-ditch effort to reduce infection rates from the coronavirus pandemic.

Much of the new legislation is intended to provide a stronger legal basis to the virtual lockdown of the entire country which was imposed yesterday by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a raft of extraordinary restrictions not seen in Britain since World War II.

The government hopes that the extraordinary measures - which include the closure of all shops not selling essential goods and confining the entire population to their homes - will prevent the country's medical services from being overwhelmed.

"Without a huge national effort to halt the growth of this virus, there will come a moment when no health service in the world could possibly cope; because there won't be enough ventilators, enough intensive care beds, enough doctors and nurses," Mr Johnson explained.

But with confirmed deaths from coronavirus infections now recording a sixfold increase on the same period last week, there are fears that the measures may have come too late.

The British government, which initially recorded lower infection rates than countries such as Italy and Spain, was at first dismissive of lockdown measures introduced there.

More importantly, the British authorities persuaded themselves that their initial strategy, which was to reserve acute care beds in hospital only for the elderly or the very ill while telling younger people infected with coronavirus to isolate themselves at home, would succeed in preventing Britain's National Health Service from being overwhelmed.

And as early as the start of last week, the strategy of carefully preserving resources seemed to be working, with only a fifth of the acute beds in hospitals being occupied by coronavirus patients, and death rates much lower than those recorded in other key European countries.

Yet, two developments persuaded the British government to move towards enforcing a complete freeze on all population movements: An exponential growth in infection rates which in its steep rising curve ominously mirrors that experienced by Italy, plus clear evidence that the British public was not respecting official advice to avoid unnecessary travel and stay home.

During the past weekend, one of the mildest and sunniest of the season, hundreds of thousands of Britons mingled in close proximity in public parks, precisely what the government wanted to prevent. And Monday's early morning rush hour was almost as busy as always on London's Underground, indicating that people were widely ignoring government advice. So, compulsory measures had to be introduced.

But with more than 350 deaths and around 7,000 confirmed infections, Mr Johnson's strategy in coping with the crisis is still coming under critical scrutiny, especially over its persistent failure to apply specific tests for the infection, or even to introduce temperature scanning tests in malls and business office complexes.

"In Singapore, restaurants remain open and schools are reopening", said Mr Jeremy Hunt, a former British foreign minister who also previously held the health government portfolio. But in Britain, he added, "we went in the opposite direction and stopped testing in the community".

"How can we possibly suppress the virus if we don't know where it is?" asked Mr Hunt, who claims that the real figure of infections in Britain now stands at around 300,000, and predicts that up to one million Britons may be infected by the coronavirus by the end of next week.

Mr Matthew Hancock, the current British health secretary, has promised to ramp up testing, especially of medical staff. The government is also in talks with Amazon, the online retailer, in the hope of using Amazon's sophisticated logistical network to deliver coronavirus test kits to health and other critical workers.

But British government officials were also forced to admit that at no time in this crisis did they meet their self-imposed target of conducting 10,000 virus tests each day, and on most days this month, not even half of that daily target was reached.

By the beginning of this week, therefore, Britain had carried out only around 1,200 tests per one million people, far behind the roughly 6,500 tests per one million people carried out in Singapore or South Korea. In short, the British government simply has no way of knowing just how extensive its health challenge is.

Either way, there is a consensus in London that the next 10 days will be crucial to the handling of the epidemic.

For that will be the time span during which it will become clear whether the British truly succeeded in avoiding the tragedy of Italy.