Im sorry CBB, but from the very first post, you have been dismissive of everything that is being done, mostly from the angle of 'look at the useless Tories'. You promote the South Korea model of dealing with the crisis without understanding what it is, and now you want to know why are WE (along with the rest of the Western Hemisphere) were not as prepared as the Koreans were.
Well what were we preparing for...exactly? Unless you have an infallible crystal ball, there is only so much you can prepare for. That is unless you think we should be prepared for absolutely everything. Should we have 20,000 intensive care beds waiting, just in case....Good luck paying the bill.
New strains of viruses appear all the time. One passed through last autumn affecting children mainly. Most are mild, or hard to catch, or pass through without a single newspaper headline. The first announcement of the Covid virus was last week of December, at which point it looked like something that could be contained in China. That was WHO advice. South Korea didn't begin their preparations until mid January. The first cases in Europe were on January 24th. In Italy the Lombardy cluster wasn't identified until February 21st, and despite a lock-down put in place a fortnight after, just two weeks after that they have 7,500 deaths. Italy has the best healthcare in Europe, so they say. Go on, tell me that was predictable.
You seem to accept that different approaches work differently for different populations and cultures. I suggest that what works in one place is not guaranteed to be the best solution in another, especially if you look beneath the numbers and understand how they work. There may be several approaches that work successfully. Ours may be one of them. We'll find out in a couple of weeks if the infections have fallen sharply.
Now we go back over the 'warnings'. So after two significant respiratory viruses emerging in SE Asia in the last fifteen years, it wouldn't be too much of a leap to imagine that there was a chance another virus would emerge in the next 15 years. Even I can predict that. Lots of people claiming that they 'knew and tried to warn us.' Did they bollocks... No-one could predict the nature of the C-19 virus and speed of transmission, the seriousness of the illness in terms of mortality, nor exactly how to deal with it. Its just guesses, based on other guesses.
I found this on the web, the page of official warnings about Covid19 issued to the Central Alerting System of the NHS and PHE. It makes an interesting read actually to see the advice from day 1, and how it has progressed.
https://www.cas.mhra.gov.uk/Help/CoronavirusAlerts.aspx
All I am saying is what I have said from the start. Trust the Scientists and the Clinicians who have studied these situations, dealt with them before, or at least seen them dealt with rather than being critical and coming up with your own solutions. If people think that they shouldn't trust what the government is asking them to do, then they will go to parks in large numbers, they will cough in your ear'ole at Asda and they will fail to do the simple things that will see us out the other side of this in the shortest possible time.
Another document that makes interesting reading. These reports and lots of others are produced by teams of NHS folk every year.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...nal-flu-report-summary-3-january-2020-week-53