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So when China, South Korea etc, who all have much greater experience in these matters than us, started to clamp down hard, our government faffed about and didn’t implement restrictions or even testing until weeks afterwards, you were happy with that? It wasn’t a difficult decision, it should have been a tough but necessary decision, but Johnson, being a libertarian conservative (which is fucked up in itself) didn’t have the balls to take the necessary steps. Which is we are where we are now.
If the world is to learn anything from this mess it’s that we need a worldwide immediate response to even the slightest sign of a pandemic in the future.
jj72-
I agree to the extent that past experience tells us that rapid, imperfect action is often better than slow-but-perfect action in these instances, but it's really important to remember that (i) for all our talk of the blitz spirit we are a fairly liberal-inclined country that value our freedom and therefore police enforcement would only work to the degree that we consent to it, and (ii) even for those of us that are more likely to fall in line with government guidelines (myself included) "lockdown fatigue" is a real thing. Alongside epidemiological advice, one of the things that the government was told was "don't implement lockdown too early, because people will only comply for so long". What we're seeing right now is exactly that; the government guidelines are lagging slightly behind what people are already doing.
ffm
But there have been lots of potential pandemics. If the response to the first slightest sign of a potential pandemic was instant lockdown that would be a bad policy. They didn't choose optics over action, they made a difficult call that everyone is now criticising in hindsight.