Yep. Last I heard, the country in Europe with the worst death toll wasn't the UK - it's pretty middle of the pack right now, though a lot of people here seem to believe otherwise. It was the Czech Republic, the big European success story the BBC and everyone else in the press pointed to a year ago as proof we should be able to do better if only we had a competent government. And as you say countries like Taiwan and Singapore are starting to struggle now with the first stages of outbreaks that are proving hard to control.

Taiwan had pandemic plans. Many suggest that countries cannot be compared. While this is true in some instances, it is not a useful observation in this case.

Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively. The UK had to start from scratch. The UK would be best served to have detailed plans in the event of distasters (not just pandemics).

>Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not. This allowed them to get started with contact tracing earlier and more effectively.

To be clear - this is you speculating and correlating two things that may or may not be causally related. India is a good example of a country that had a very light initial COVID wave last year, but is now drowning. What's the difference? Government policy? Maybe but India isn't exactly famous for having a well run government bureaucracy. Deadlier COVID variants? Maybe?

What if how hard your population is hit really just comes down to the prevalent variant your population is exposed to. After all, there is evidence that the variants in Europe and North America were much more deadly and virulent than the strains in Asia.

My observation is that countries with detailed plans for rare, but serious, crises are more likely to be better-placed than a country that does not. I realise this is a fairly obvious one and other factors may change outcomes thereafter.

With regard to the more dangerous strains, it is highly plausible that if you can contain the spread, you can reduce the chance of more dangerous strains evolving and getting a foothold. In that case, one might suppose that despite the preparedness in Taiwan, they have been undermined by what's been happening in other parts of the world.

There are important things to be learned from India's experience, but I am not sure what - probably a combination of factors. AFAIK (which is not much) we are some way away from a unified model which explains all the variations in the progression of this epidemic.

Not only was the UK considered to have some of the best pandemic planning in the world prior to Covid hitting, there was pretty aggressive contact tracing and testing here early on, based as you'd expect on what the UK did to keep SARS and MERS out. The elephant in the room here seems to be Italy, which appears to have been reporting zero cases up until the point somewhere in the rough ballpark of 1% of their population was infected. This kind of early contact tracing and testing just doesn't work if you have no idea who to test or trace the contacts of, and being a major travel hub next door to a country with massive undetected community spread seems pretty fatal. Now, the UK did end up abandoning contact tracing around the time of the first lockdown, but that was long after it had already clearly failed.

Letting all the schoolkids and leafy surrey familes off on their ski holidays to Italy in Feb half term (15th-23rd) was probably one early bad decision, how much different that would have made in the mid term, but closing borders was never on the cards for any country - closing heathrow was unthinkable even in mid March.

New Zealand borders closed on 19 March 2020. Based on deaths and IFR at that time, there were likely 150,000 new cases a day in the UK on 19th March. Closing borders then wasn't going to stop the spread.

Maybe a strict lockdown after the Feb half term and a total closure of all borders - including lorry drivers, could have worked.

Would it be worth it? The age-standardised mortality rate for the UK in 2020 was 1,043.50 per 100k, the highest since....

2008, when it was 1,091.90 per 100k. That wasn't an anomoly either - every year from 1990 to 2008 was higher. Even ignoring ages, the crude mortality rate per 100k was higher for every year before 2003.

> Not only was the UK considered to have some of the best pandemic planning in the world prior to Covid hitting

While that is true, the UK "was considered" as such, both of those little words are key, especially _was_. This misperception has been overtaken by reality.

This feels like circular logic. The countries which did better of course did so because they had the best pandemic planning, and we know they had the best pandemic planning because they did better.

Do you have any other suggestions on how to evaluate pandemic planning other than by the effects of putting those plans into action? "a priori"?

Actually, this seems to be the dirty secret of pandemic planning - as far as I can tell, there really doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate how effective specific policies are. Even for established diseases and measures, like closing schools during a flu pandemic, the evidence is vague and contradictory.

Coming to conclusions about how good countries' pandemic planning is based on how well they've done is even less meaningful, because it doesn't even attempt to deal with confounding factors or simple luck. It's certainly very suspicious that so many Covid-19 success stories were in the same geographic Asia-Pacific area, despite having very different cultures, policies and measures.

> Actually, this seems to be the dirty secret of pandemic planning - as far as I can tell, there really doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate how effective specific policies are.

Before an actual pandemic, that may be somewhat true. although some measures are blatantly counterproductive, e.g https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/13/boris-johnso...

An actual disaster though, is a "can't fake it" test of disaster preparedness.

So you agree with what I said here prior evaluations were overtaken by events? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27290252

Are you arguing for the opposite - i.e. that the pandemic planning was actually great, despite the terrible way that the pandemic was handled?

> Taiwan had a detailed plan in the event of a pandemic, the UK did not.

That's not true. At the beginning of Feb last year I searched if there was any UK pandemic plan. I found the active pandemic flu planning documents. 80% of it was about dealing with dead bodies, with stuff like turning Hyde Park into an open air morgue and insisting that each council has a plan of where to put the bodies.

There was little else in the plan, regarding preventing/hospital management.

The impression that I got reading them was that it was all about managing the consequences, and very little about fighting the pandemic. Defeatism basically.

I should've been more precise in my wording. There was not enough detail where it really mattered, such as the example you give of 'preventing/hospital management'.

Germany did pretty well, specially considering its border countries and population density.

Did they though? Right now UK is sitting at a total of 4.5 million cases, and Germany has 3.6 million. By per capita case count, UK is at #50 globally, and Germany is at #73. That's certainly better, but it isn't _significantly_ better. It's not an order of magnitude better. It's middle of the pack better. And that's you picking and choosing a country. Plenty of European nations did worse as well. So if you were to take a random sample of EU nations, UK is pretty much in the middle.

If you sort this[1] graph by per-capita absolute deaths, you can see the nations ahead of the UK are pretty poor. Compared to France and Germany, the UK has about double the per-capita death rate.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

UK didn't do widespread testing in the first few months. People into hospital were tested, and those figures suggest that there were 3.5 million cases by the end of April 2020, and over 10 million now.

> Which government didn't? I mean, I look around, and nobody really has it figured out.

Plenty of articles on that - e.g. google "which countries handled covid best"

It's just not accurate to say that every country handled it equally badly. Even though the ones that handled it well were not what one would initially expect.

https://twitter.com/_artesean/status/1396463706897272832

Australia pretty much nailed it.

All they have done is kicked the can.

They can vaccinate but at some point, probably years after the world is back to normal, they will need to reopen and then Covid deaths will occur.

Australia have also been brutal with regards to lockdowns and civil liberties. Citizens literallly cannot leave or enter their own country easily. They still have years of short sharp lockdowns to contend with.

Glad I’m living in the UK rather than Australia and that’s a sentence I didn’t ever see myself writing!

If they vaccinate, then they will avoid COVID deaths when they reopen. The vaccine completely changes the game from "kicking the can down the road" into "total victory."

If they vaccinate adequately, why would they have Covid deaths anywhere near the same magnitude as the US/UK?

Is there a reason Aus/NZ won't be able to vaccinate to the level the UK has so far by next summer?

death/cases yes, but they became a "hermit kingdom" in the process. their attitude re covid put me off from ever considering them as a place where i'd like to spend the rest of my days.

I'm not sure that's fair.

Internally almost everything is open (a few temp local lockdowns happen). Their bars, restaurants, schools and stadiums have been BAU for months.

Externally, it's hard to get in/out. But that's true everywhere right now isn't it?

I'm in the uk, there are about 6 countries where i can travel to right now with the blessings of both places.

I'm much prefer to have spent the last 12m in Aus personally...