Also, it's important to bear in mind that during the time period the UK needed to impose travel or quarantine restrictions on Europe, Italy was reporting two ca

Also, it's important to bear in mind that during the time period the UK needed to impose travel or quarantine restrictions on Europe, Italy was reporting two cases of coronavirus total, the most recent of which was someone repatriated from Wuhan and quarantined. That was less than the UK. There has been a chorus of articles from every corner of the British press insisting that the current quarantine is stupid and ill-thought-out because most of the countries it applies to are reporting fewer cases than the UK. The only way the media and pundit complaints about the UK not imposing quarantine earlier are anything but a cynical use of hindsight is if they'd have somehow been more supportive of this before the vivid demonstration of how a country reporting almost no cases could doom us all than they were after it. Which is absurd. (The reason Italy was reporting so few cases seems to be that they weren't testing people who were hospitalized with symptoms unless they'd travelled to China or had contact with someone who had. There were a few other countries like the US which had similar criteria on paper, but they were generally willing to test other patients based on clinical suspicion. Italy apparently managed to genuinely fail to test hospitalized patients right up until the point where, by sheer coincidence, someone was hospitalized with coronavirus after contact with a traveller from China who turned out not to be the source of the infection.)