There is so much wilful ignorance on this thread; it is shocking.
A disease, by definition, propagates exponentially. If it didn’t, it would never go beyond a few cases from time to time.
Diseases die down when herd immunity is attained. Although it is arguable that we have achieved this in certain sectors of the population, in certain places, we are miles away from it at population level. The central estimate are we are 10-15% of the way to herd immunity, which, for the mathematically ignorant (of whom there are clearly many on this thread), means 85-90% left to go, or about 6-9 times the cases and maybe another 200,000 deaths.
The NHS completely failed to deal with the first peak, despite all the clapping (not the fault of the doctors and nurses but of an underprovisioned and poorly managed service). You could not see a medical practitioner unless you were actually turning blue! Many, many people died at home without treatment and cancer patients with decent prognoses are now condemned to death. So, let’s not kid ourselves here! The main triumph of the NHS was PR. Most still believed it was here for them, even if they weren’t Tory grandees, very few panicked.
Most of Europe did so much better than us because they locked down properly and actually enforced it. With a few hundred new cases daily and efficient track and trace in place, they can afford to get back to normal life. We have 2,000 cases still and track and trace untested.
Now Boris is forced into releasing the lockdown prematurely due to Cummings, hoping that the nice weather and a degree of herd immunity will buy him a few weeks of triumph. It is a very high risk gamble.
We used to be known as the ‘sick man of Europe’ due to our poor economy in the 1970s. We are about to achieve this status far more literally, becoming the ‘infected zone’ which other Europeans will avoid.
Spun and epidemics are a very bad mix.