Their approach is highly experimental, which makes it all the more bizarre that they aren't testing very much. They have a "developing world" or "overwhelmed country" cases:deaths ratio (about 1:8) which suggests that they have a huge number of cases they don't know about. It's not clear why a country taking a radically experimental approach to COVID-19 would also test so lightly - it suggests that they don't want to know what's going on.

It's possible that they don't want to have embarrassingly high case numbers, but it's just as possible that their numbers are embarrassing in the other direction - i.e. while they've killed a huge bunch of oldies, they also haven't got nearly enough cases to have herd immunity.

We will also get to see, long term, what the morbidity effects of taking this approach are. They will not look super-intelligent if there is any kind of effective treatment or vaccine developed in the next 6-12 months.

They only look good when you compare them with hard-hit countries. The difference is that Belgians and Spaniards aren't patrolling every goddamn social media site announcing how well they've done with the virus.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...

Getting the death rate is tricky, what you need to look at is the increase in mortality over the 5 year average.

This gives a number of covid deaths at 40-80k, and thus an infection of 3-15 million depending on the actual fatality rate.

That means letting it run free, assuming immunity once you have it, and a 65% herd immunity level, would mean at least another 100k deaths and possibly as high as 1 million. Most likely 250k more. There is no appetite in the UK currently for that.