I've been Zooming regularly with family in New Zealand, which is held up as having handled everything perfectly. My cousins there think it's all very funny.
They point out that in Auckland and the other main cities there have been loads of people who didn't observe lockdown back in March and even in the more recent one last summer there were crowds on beaches and parties and everything we complain about over here. There was also panic buying and fights in supermarkets and there have been shortages.
They feel they were lucky that Covid never got a grip there, as it had in Switzerland and Italy and Austria with the ski season. They also point out that they are thousands of miles away from the nearest landmass, have relatively few international flights which were all quickly and easily stopped, and even their biggest cities tend to have a lowish population density.
I keep reading people saying that they want to go and live in New Zealand because it's a country where the government has looked after its population properly, but from all I'm told by my contacts the government's done relatively little except shut down the ports and airports (easily done) and impose lockdown restrictions. It's looked to us and other European countries, such as Germany, for its lead.
My Kiwi contacts are envious of us having the vaccination over here, because although they aren't currently in lockdown of any kind there and life is going on as normal, they're suffering financially for various reasons (including thousands of Kiwis who've been working abroad suddenly coming home and driving up the cost of housing). The tourist industry, which is a big earner, has gone and until everyone's vaccinated it's unlikely to take off again.
On another front I read the other day that in Wales they've been testing the Covid virus, looking for mutations, more times each week than France has since March. That was a bit shocking.
I'm not a Tory supporter but I'm not sure any of the other parties or leaders would have done much better. Germany seems to have done better than us but it's very difficult to know for sure because the statistics are all counting different things. In a few years' time, when excess deaths have been calculated properly, it may look different.
I hear of the chaos in the US from friends in Oregon, California, New York and North Carolina, I have Belgian and Dutch and Danish friends wailing about the awfulness of their own government response and on the whole I feel quite glad to be here in the UK, despite everything.