So, 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

So, 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.