What a depressing thread to read.
It astonishes me that people are still blaming each other rather than the Government.
Some of us begged MPs to close the borders in January until we knew what we were dealing with. The numbers coming out of China made it clear it was extremely infectious and the R0 was somewhere between 3 and 5 unchecked.
MPs ignoref this and Boris went off on holiday before even bothering to attend meetings about it. Countries that did close their borders at that point mostly now enjoy pretty much normal life, just with no international travel. I think most people here would take that over this shitshow. Supporting businesses reliant on the travel industry would have cost an order of magnitude less than our Government has spent already, aside from the human suffering the ineptitude has caused and continues to cause.
They then, having let the virus get a hold on the country and despite seeing what had happened already in Italy and Spain, locked down too late (against the scientific advice from their advisors). This meant a much longer lockdown with more suffering and economic damage was needed to achieve the same position.
Then they released the lockdown too early (again against scientific advice) when case numbers were still too high for test and trace to manage.
They ignored establish local public health teams and bunged the test and trace contract to their mates who have spectacularly failed. They had all summer to fix this and told us themselves it was the key to preventing further lockdowns.
They also had all summer, and the data by then, to know opening universities would be a disaster. Courses should have been moved online from the start.
They also knew secondary schools would be a disaster because of the inability to distance. Tens of thousands of theatres, sports stadiums, sports centres, community halls, libraries, hotel conference rooms etc stand empty and could have been used to enable socially distanced teaching. But nothing was done.
Then yet again, all of these mistakes led to an entirely predictable (qnd predicted) rise in cases yet they ignored their advisors again and lock down 6 weeks later than advised when the virus is running riot.
Anybody who believes restrictions will be lifted in early Dec is living in cloud cuckoo land I'm afraid.
This was all entirely manageable had our Government been prepared. Pandemic has been top of the Government risk register for years in terms of likelihood and impact. Everyone knew it would happen, it was a question of when. Operation Cynus in 2016 told the Government exactly which parts of the UK infrastructure were vulnerable and underprepared for pandemic and what to do to fix this. Not one of those recommendations was acted upon.
Anybody still blaming the public for this is short of brain cells. Yes some people have behaved irresponsibly, which is always the case pandemic or not. That should have been factored into the planning. It is certainly not the cause of our present predicament. Your anger, OP, is entirely misplaced.