It's enough to make you sick

The winter vomiting virus is a nasty beast; so why is it being such a problem this year?

Well there are two main reasons:
Firstly, thanks to general cutbacks in the hospital sector, hospitals are running at occupancy rates of close to 100%. They were never designed for this, and it means that when a infectious case arises it is almost impossible to isolate it, with inevitable consequences.

Secondly, what does a poor patient lying at home, in pain and vomiting do? There is no longer an out of hours GP service, so they end up going to their local A and E; once they are there they have ample opportunity to spead the wretched bug to everyone else.

So, the government didn't cause this outbreak, but they certainly created the opportunity for it to cause chaos.