Still, there has not been the same hit from the disease, which only underlines that the differences in effect that are seen worldwide are about differences in population and geography - being overweight, having a very low friction of movement (e.g. excellent transport links, many borders), and not being low in vitamin D etc - far more than they are about government response.
I'm not saying the UK government has done well but it's striking to me that, from a distance, the criticisms of the UK and US I see coming from my friends are very similar, very parochial, and seem driven by media headlines rather than anything objectively sound.
In short, I'd give it another few years before you judge them more harshly than the government that brought us the Iraq war, for one.
I haven't seen the word used outside the UK so a definition might be useful: a quango, or quasi non-governmental organisation is the platypus of the British government world. As the name implies it's neither a part of the government nor the private sector. Instead, quangos are paid for by taxpayers but are completely unaccountable to them, as they can't be directly controlled by ministers or the civil service.
The theory behind this is that governments are crap at things because elected politicians interfere with the expert work of technocrats. So by setting up artificial blockades to political interference, power is transferred to technocrats and things should work better.
In practice what happens is that the government ends up hiring people who aren't very good at what they claim to be expert in, and who get corrupted by whatever unaccountable powers have been delegated to them. But they aren't easily fixable because they're "independent".
The Electoral Commission is a good example of a completely broken quango. Its only goal in life is to organise elections and referendums in ways that everyone agrees is completely fair and trustworthy. It is a staggering failure: the board of directors is full of people who publicly state very strong political opinions. It engaged in a legal vendetta against people who campaigned for Brexit. It has constantly prosecuted pro-Leave campaigners and got its ass kicked in court, where judges have repeatedly dismissed cases on the grounds that they have no evidence and/or are engaged in malicious legal behaviour. They've referred cases to the police that were then dropped for lack of evidence. Senior staff have posted on Facebook that they cried when the Tories won the election. Nobody who has followed these sagas can possibly believe these people are neutral, independent or even possess basic competence, but as they're a "quango" there isn't much of a framework to fix it beyond changing the law to totally abolish them.
tl;dr quango = power without accountability.