The fully democratic west did a lot worse than some dictatorial states or those with an expectation of government surveillance (S Korea/Singapore/Taiwan) simply because we live in societies where we can do whatever we want to do until it is prohibited.
Hence Boris's discomfort at locking us down.
Other countries have the viwe that everything is prohibited until expressly permitted, so lockdown was a less anguished option and they did better than we did.
It is a balance. The UK is so multi-cultural and so evidently the 'crossroads of the world' that we were inevitably going to suffer badly, although we can only say this with hindsight.
Although I have lost friends and acquaintances to Covid, I am not sure that starting lockdown a week earlier would have changed the figures dramatically. We needed to start a month earlier, but there is no way the British people would have stood for that.
Thankfully the phone numbers in Boris's mobile phone have got us out of the mess far more quickly than almost every other country. I know that when overseas travel for holidays is permitted, I shall be only considering the USA and Israel until Europe has sorted itself out.
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