I'm guessing that the UK has decided this can't be practically contained, that even total shutdown will only push it back a couple of months with huge cost. As

I'm guessing that the UK has decided this can't be practically contained, that even total shutdown will only push it back a couple of months with huge cost. As such they are just going to accept mass casualties. See figure 4 at the bottom of this preprint from one of the UK research groups about the tactics in Wuhan: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033050v1.full.pdf+html https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033050v... they appear to be modeling here that even a total shutdown for a month, or for two months, will still lead to a similar epidemic. I think that similar thinking is driving the UK policy but that's just a guess. I wrote a blog post trying to predict the impact of this virus on Ireland. The fatality rates look grim: https://medium.com/@fergal.reid/predicting-the-impact-of-coronovirus-on-ireland-bff1b6d00d6a https://medium.com/@fergal.reid/predicting-the-impact-of-cor...