One thing that is trickier for the U.K. government is that we don't have and are not required to carry ID cards and don't have to, for example, register our presence at local town halls etc. So actually in terms of some of the tracing and policing we are really at a huge disadvantage. I think ID cards are sensible, but there has been huge resistance to this for years on "big brother" grounds. Well, you pay your money you take your choice.
The government initially did do tracing but really it was so difficult to identify those people who would have come into contact with people through very minor interactions (shops, public transport) etc. that once you have a certain amount of spread in urban areas it gets very hard.
We don't have local and dispersed testing facilities to the extent of France and Germany (personally I think we should, and that probably this would be a service that could be well served in a partnership with the private sector, which is what those countries do - in Paris, there is literally a laboratoire d'analyses on every few streets. It's about efficacy of service and not about clinical decisions or allocation of resources so it is perfect for outsourcing, just like we do with eye care in the U.K., but I suspect this is an unpopular view!!). So France and Germany already had the local well dispersed partnership with, effectively, the private sector for testing and were comfortable using it - the same cannot be said for Public Heath England, who wanted to centralise for overall control, which means really building a massive amount of local-but-controlled-centrally testing centres. Which is what has held things up.
Don't get me wrong, I think some of the messaging could be better communicated, but some of the comparisons being made are not like with like.
Finally, perhaps this crisis and all the comparison flying around, fair or not, will prompt a discussion that is more grown up around healthcare - ie do you want to pay more for it like Germany (being a young person starting out and paying for your own healthcare contributions is actually quite hard - people in the U.K. used to pocketing a larger portion of a low salary would be shocked)? Would you like to see more sensible private sector partnerships in eg diagnostic testing? private sector involvement is not all about awful PFI contracts and profiteering, but that has been the narrative for a long time -
this crisis has shown that the private sector can do good when employed in the right way. Also, wealthy older people should be contributing more to fund their own care and carers should be paid more with better controls on quality. Sadly, whilst the generation born between 1950 and 1964 all believe that they contributed to the system and shouldn't be asked for any more, the actual truth is that they will have taken out 118% of what they paid on average in taxes by the time they die. This is not hating on people older than myself - I would be very happy to inherit less and have a system that treats everyone with dignity in old age.