I think it's easier to speak in hindsight than it is to implement actions at the time.
We aren't the only country that got it wrong, but I think we are one of the highest in terms of death rates, but it's hard to judge because all the countries had/have their own way of counting covid deaths. The UK as far as I'm aware are the only country that counts dying within 4 weeks of having covid or covid symptoms as a covid death. We aren't doing autopsy's on those that are dying to confirm if they died of covid.
Britain's population is a pretty unhealthy one also, our damp miserable climate probably doesn't help matters either.
I don't necessarily believe we need a finger pointing exercise, but we do need to implement improvements for the next bout of whatever disease is going to come out.
I think after bird flu, SARS 2 which turned out to be nothing the UK got lack luster.
I also feel the government were damned regardless what protocol they implemented. If they locked down sooner the guardian readers would have been up in arms for locking the country down to soon..
In anything like this there is always smart bottoms who come out with bull poop about how they could have done it so much better and this and that should have been done.
But it's easy to say that after the event..
Listen to the science they said, if we listened to the science we'd still be in full 1st lockdown.
I find these types are rather single minded in their thinking, my engineers are the same, whenever they work on an engine they want the full set of OEM special tools, which is unrealistic we wouldn't make any money, so we have to looks t the tools we 100% need, then look at the ones we could do with to make things a little easier and then theirs the ones that really we can use alternative items from our tools boxes.