>I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're not. What version of "every countr

>I just don't understand how the UK, a modern first world democracy, can be quite so far behind every other country. They're not. What version of "every country" do you have in mind? Most other countries also failed at contact tracing early on. The only country in Europe that had and used effective contact tracing was Germany. Almost everywhere else it has made little or not contribution. If you look at the epi curves then the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have had basically the same outbreak (France a little less). So there is no need to wonder why the UK is special because it isn't. There is plenty to say about which European countries responded well and which didn't and why even Germany's response was markedly inferior to countries like Vietnam but that has to start from a data driven perspective that doesn't pretend that the UK is particularly special.