I think you've moderated my view a little. I guess my opinions on the UK handling came from watching the graphs, sometimes on a daily basis, then comparing wher

I think you've moderated my view a little. I guess my opinions on the UK handling came from watching the graphs, sometimes on a daily basis, then comparing where we were on the graphs to where we were on policy, and often tearing my hair out over the disconnect. This deep fear and frustration, combined with my awareness of what british politics is like (The Thick of It is considered fairly realistic), and having so much skin in the game made me frankly very frustrated, scared, and angry. I wasn't doing the same in regards to Belgium - so I didn't have the really powerful opinion-forming experiences of doing stuff like trying to convince my immuno-compromised mother to not attend a choral evensong(!) when the graphs were ascending vertically and there were 30000 new cases every day. Learning in retrospect that Boris Johnson was saying 'I should have been the mayor from Jaws', and 'get covid, live longer', makes my blood boil - because it totally makes sense. That's the only conversation people could have been having behind the scenes that leads to the second lockdown being called so late, or COVID patients being sent directly back to care homes, or all the rest of it. My feeling would be, instead of calling the UK normal, why not ask, what went wrong in Belgium? We know, more or less, what went wrong in Italy, for instance. I think that COVID is one of the clearest policy-to-outcomes phenomena we've seen, because specific policies ('non-pharmaceutical interventions') could be watched, on the graphs (in terms of R0, GDP, etc), in real time. Policy failures are not only visible, but also visible as quantities, and often directly comparable across nations.