The crisis facing Britain this winter is depressingly familiar. Stay-at-home orders and empty streets. Hospitals overflowing. A daily toll of many hundreds of coronavirus deaths, AP reports.

The UK is the epicentre of Europe’s Covid-19 outbreak once more, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is facing questions, and anger, as people demand to know how the country has ended up here — again.

Many countries are enduring new waves of the virus, but Britain’s is among the worst, and it comes after a horrendous 2020. More than 3 million people in the UK have tested positive for the coronavirus and 81,000 have died — 30,000 in just the last 30 days. The economy has shrunk by 8 per cent, more than 800,000 jobs have been lost and hundreds of thousands more furloughed workers are in limbo.

Much of the blame for Britain’s poor performance has been laid at the door of Johnson, who came down with the virus in the spring and ended up in intensive care. Critics say his government’s slow response as the new respiratory virus emerged from China was the first in a string of lethal mistakes.

Read more: Johnson under fire as UK again faces onslaught of Covid-19