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Tyler Cowen made this point a few months ago (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/which-country-has-had-the-best-response-to-the-coronavir
by Smaug123 6y ago
Tyler Cowen made this point a few months ago (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/which-country-has-had-the-best-response-to-the-coronavirus.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/wh...): the public health response has been "generally poor" but the UK was first on the mark with dexamethasone and has been among the first with the vaccines. He went as far as saying the UK has had the best response to COVID despite the public health response.
- ddek 6y agoSo, a member of my immediate family is senior management at Public Health England, the civil service institution that should have been planning for this. When the government announced they were shutting down PHE, in an attempt to copy the RKI (forgetting that PHE is far more than disease control, of course), the RKI wrote a letter to all senior management at PHE. This was quite a confused letter - the RKI didn’t understand why the UK gov were making this decision, when the RKI modelled their processes on PHE. I’ve read the letter. Add to this, daily squabbles between cabinet office and other branches of government. If there was good news, you’d hear back immediately and you’d be blocked from sharing it. Bad news, cabinet would stall sometimes for weeks. But ultimately all the guidance was irrelevant because the UK government are not interested in listening to it. When an adviser egregiously broke the rules, a story which dominated the headlines for weeks, they changed the rules. You see it now - the UK isn’t even on the downslope of wave 2, but apparently in 2 weeks we’ll have fans at football games and business as usual.