It seems to me that this thread intentionally addresses two things. The first is how to deal with the Covid 19 pandemic.
The Common Cold is a constant threat, there is no vaccine available against it and no cure - at best the symptoms can be alleviated a bit. People get it every year and some many times a year - everyone who gets it suffers for a while to a varying degree but everyone, absolutely everyone, recovers with no long term adverse effects. There is no alarm and no perceived danger from the Common Cold, just some degree of economic cost.
Covid 19 is the same except for one important thing, it can cause serious illness which without adequate medical intervention, and sometimes (just sometimes) even with excellent medical help it will kill the host. Covid 19 is also really quite contagious, not as contagious as Noro virus or one or two others, but quite contagious all the same. Two necessities flow from these two characteristics. It is important to take action to slow down the spread of the illness in order to manage the pressure on the health system because in rising numbers patients will need hospitalisation. The other need is for a really capable health system to look after the patients and successfully treat the maximum of patients and minimise the incidence of deaths.
The success of "the system", leadership, health/care services and public protection agencies combined, must be measured by how well the pressure on the health system is managed. The other and more definitive measure is how many patients are lost - those who die rather than recover are the ones who vote for no confidence in the action and/or inaction and failure of "the system".
A country which has a modest case-per-million-of-population number can give themselves a pat on the back. Those countries which have a case-numbers-to-deaths (ratio of total count of each) of as high as 180 have been truly successful and these are the ones which, in the final analysis, can be said to have done well.
Now we should look through the figures on
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
and ask ourselves without bias and in all honesty how to judge the second part/aspect of this thread. The UK's scores on the two measures are currently 3909 and 7.159 respectively.