>>11794140I'm from the UK, it was 100% politics for us.
The long story is that the government's strategy was based on a pandemic preparedness 'wargame' from a few years ago that came to the conclusion that the measures needed to save a lot of lives causes massive economic damage to the economy which would be politically undesirable (to the Tories). As a result they changed mitigation measures towards trying to find a sweet spot between economic damage and human cost i.e. avoiding a stringent lockdown but issuing reccommendations, home working, reducing contact for the vulnerable and performing mass contact tracing and reccomending self isolation for those who might be infectious.
It very quickly became clear that this wasn't working due to the labour intensive contact tracing system becoming overwhelmed, unclear and contradictory advice from the gov, a number of people refusing to self isolate and the general public at large not following reccomendations to generally reduce travel & wfh ('it's not *banned* so i'm going to carry on seeing nana, i'll just wash my hands before and after herp a fucking derp') This was compounded at a critical time by gov. themselves not following their own advice meaning a lot of them got it and ended up sick and useless during a critical time (pic related, larry is the housecat at no. 10 downing street)
The entire month before the gov. started taking things seriously and u-turned was like watching a slow motion car crash to those of us with a scientific background and/or friends and family in Italy and Spain. Don't even get me started on the 'herd immunity' & 'we're just following the science' shit.
tl;dr: Gov. thought they could get away without a lockdown and rely on people's 'common sense' to reduce the spread of disease and minimize deaths, rather than implement proven effective measures developed in Italy i.e. lockdown. British exceptionalism at it's finest. The results were predictable.
