'Doing well' to me isn't necessarily about how we compare to other countries, but how we do compared to the worst case scenario that could have occurred in the UK from the moment the pandemic hit.
I do think a lot of our deaths were essentially 'baked in' from the moment the pandemic started and are down to long term chronic issues that by the pandemic started we couldn't reverse, we could only minimise.
The idea that the UK could ever have had less deaths than Germany given the number of Intensive Care beds, and crucially the staff for them, we had before the pandemic seems a crazy notion.
The idea that we could have less deaths than places in Europe which didn't have such extremes of poverty also seems a crazy idea. We know poverty is linked directly to life expectancy and poorer health.
It was about keeping our inevitable excess deaths down. And that includes going forward over the next 5 to 10 years via indirect health issues too. The UK's position means we have to seriously factor in how another lockdown might impact health outcomes related to poverty and other health issues every bit as much as related directly to covid itself.
If we have managed to stop another lockdown thats a massive thing. Its not one thats easily measurable nor quantifiable so people tend to dismiss it and do the rather more simplistic thing of comparing us to our nearest neighbours.
We have definitely prevented a lot of deaths from covid that would have occurred if we hadn't had lockdowns and vaccinations. Thats our success. Again something thats difficult to quantify. Instead we frame ourselves as failing because we've had more than elsewhere rather than based on the metrics of what our worse case scenario was likely to be based on our socio-economic demographics versus the metrics of another country's unique and different socio-economic demographics. It might well show some surprisingly things.
The pandemic isn't over. If Europe is still to go into another wave with the German health minister warning about 'we will all either be vaccinated, recovered or dead' in the context of delta and low vaccine uptake you need to see that as an admission that Germany is at risk of having a really big problem including deaths. Deaths that in the uk in comparible socio-economic lines have already happened.
As its been said and ignored from the beginning, you can't really judge overall how anyone has done until a few years down the line. It might well yet prove to be the case that places who had higher cases for earlier variants have better outcomes for the unvacinated than the unvaccinated who get Delta - thus your vaccination rates and acquired immunity later in the pandemic become more crucial in terms of life expectacy. Or to put it another way; if the first wave mainly only killed the most vulnerable but Delta is capable of killing a lot more younger people then it has a different impact on life expectancy. 10 people aged 80 who would ordinarily die at age 84 lose 40 years of life between them. 1 person who dies at age 40 and 9 people who die at age 80 would ordinarily die at age 84 loses 56 years of life. (This isn't being ageist in terms of saying 80 year old people are worth less than a 40 year old - its pointing out that when we measure the effectiveness of health interventions we have to consider it from a number of perspectives and how it is measured and how that impacts society as a whole. Which deaths are ultimately more preventable is a key question).
It is very conceiveable that what we may see when we can look back properly in retrospect is that country x has excess deaths which are much higher in the elderly but country y has much higher levels of excess deaths in younger people purely because of when they got hit hard by covid and what their vaccination rates were. In theory deaths in older elderly and more vulnerable populations are harder to prevent than deaths of younger and healthier people especially if they occur after vaccines have become available.
I think we could have done a lot better. I also think we have done well in a lot of respects given the hand we started playing with which gave us less options and choices and less chance of 'winning' to begin with.
I think to say we haven't done well does a massive disservice to NHS and care home staff who have worked tireless and without them putting in all those extra unsung hours we would have done a lot worse. We have done well be of things like training investment and staffing and logistics which do to a degree go back to government level whether we want to admit this or not. We do have skills and experience that other countries don't for one reason or another and that equally shouldnt be over looked.
We've performed well on the research and development side of things both in terms of vaccinations and drugs but also other best practice treatments which arent as glamorous or headline attracting. Given our bed levels a lot more people should have died than have.