Instead of always comparing the government's response to how it might have been with Jeremy Corbyn, could you compare to, say, an actual response from another government, eg Angela Merkel?
My understanding is that the main reason Germany has done so well is that they have a health system that, compared to the NHS, is far more decentralised, has hugely more capacity, and due to being semi-private is led by customer demand rather than central planning. So when the virus was immininent, hundreds of local organisations swung into action, using their own local laboratories for testing. They didn't need to wait for any central authority to authorise their actions or provide them with facilities or equipment.
I'm extrapolating here, but I'd guess that in Germany, when a hospital doesn't have PPE, it's the individual hospitals fault for not planning properly. In the UK it's the fault of the Health Secretary, and it's apparently the one in charge when the shortage occurs, not any of the several over the previous 20 years who could have chosen to stock up for this before demand exhausted supply. Presumably they failed to act on the spurious grounds that it was better to spend money on things that were certain to kill people in the foreseeable future, rather than on things that might never happen.
My understanding of the German response is based on an interview in the Guardian several weeks ago with someone who is apparently Germany's leading virus expert. He did very generously go on to say that while Germany had done better in the early stages, he thought the UK might do better in the long-term. (I think the implication is that while our central planners might take longer to get us on the right track, they have more power to implement policy consistently across the country.)
It did make me laugh when in the past week I saw another Guardian guest opinion piece that said how much better the NHS would have done if it wasn't for past Tory parties. Apparently it would have done better if it were more centralised and had less private sector involvement. The exact opposite of the what the German guy said.