@marilenagrace
What do you think ? Do you think that keeping everyone out of the country is the right approach long term to deal with covid ? Do you wish we did that here in the UK ?
What NZ in particular did was fantastic
for them and Oz have been quick to cotton on too.
While their exact approach would have been more difficult here, reliant as we are for example on cross border trade, it's a terrible mistake that we didn't try to learn any lessons from countries that got it right.
Take hotel quarantine - Oz had a number of early quarantine failures with their system, leading to minor breakouts that then caused extensive pain to shut down. When the UK finally set ours up, we didn't consider ANY of the lessons they'd learned, and built a system that's so leaky, it's frankly pointless.
Further on the subject of quarantine, while closing the borders completely was never an option here, just imagine if we'd actually stopped foreign holidays last easter, or at the very least, introduced a mandatory home quarantine on return.... the UK's first wave was so severe largely because it was seeded all over the country at the same time by returning skiers from North Italy - at the time a known virus hotspot.
So yes, the UK required a different approach to Oz, but it SHOULD have had an intelligent plan, and sadly it's taken them a year to come up with that.