* keeping schools open (mostly a success)
* avoiding economic disruption (mixed, tending towards failure)
* avoiding unnecessary deaths and long run health issues (failure)
* Avoiding a second lockdown and the related uncertainty and stress (failure)
* returning to normal life (failure)
* avoiding dangerous mutations (failure)
The UK is an island and could have fairly easily done a NZ/Australia strategy over the summer when seasonality made elimination easy. Jurisdictions that made that choice are doing better on all front.
I live in one such jurisdiction (atlantic canada) and we’ve spent less time in lockdown, had a good economy, and mostly avoided deaths and hospitalizations. Seems a clear winner.
Perhaps a country in the middle of europe couldn’t have done it but the Uk certainly could have.
And no, this pretty clearly shows govts had no long run or even medium run strategy. Europe will be in rolling lockdowns till april or so, because of a premature declaration of victory in the summer.
So once you exclude ireland, you have the channel tunnel, and a handful of ferries to france/belgium. All of which arrive at terminals and where you can do tests or register people for isolation requirements.
Australia and nz aren’t the only successes. You also have taiwan and vietnam. Very close to china, and vietnam has land borders. The biggest difference is these countries tried.
The lockdown in New Zealand had that goal to stop it completely, and achieved it.
Also, it is in general not impossible to eradicate a contagion and suppress it completely. For example, this was done with smallpox, which is about as transmissible SARS-COV2. Smallpox has been eradicated world-wide, for a quite modest price.
The health of the population, in general, is not the primary concern. We just need to stop the hospitals from collapsing.
We live with all manner of sickness and disease every day of the year without trying to eradicate them. Covid is only different from heart disease, lung cancer, and rabies in that it has the potential to swamp us.
Adjusting the throttle for spread might mean jewelry shops being open but sandwich shops being closed. It might just as well involve lockdown for anyone born in an odd month, or with a name ending in a vowel, or ginger hair. The measures are arbitrary and only used as a throttle for the inevitable spread.
This is how I sleep at night. The alternative is the worrying thought that no one in power really knows what they are doing.