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.