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See, unlike you, I don't just talk out of my ass and assume everyone else is doing it too. I actually have heard the entire range of expert opinions. Unlike Boris, I grasped pretty quickly how bad things could get. So I did some looking, long ago, before things got out of hand.
There are people, experts, who claim there should be no interventions, that the disease should be allowed to go through the population and build up herd immunity. This was the original plan A the UK had. Engels in Sweden is one of these, though he does include some of the mitigation efforts from below as well, so he's not completely laissez faire in his approach.
There are others, also experts, who argue for massive testing, and early isolation of cases, with contact tracing. Osterhom is one of these. This was the plan countries like S. Korea, Vietnam, Greece etc., followed.
The middle of the range experts like Christiakis assume you can't stop it, but you can slow it - "flatten the curve" by implementing mitigation efforts like social distancing; but because of exponential growth, the earlier you do this the better. This is what the UK finally adopted as their Plan B when it became clear Plan A was a mistake, and was going to be a disaster. The problem is they didn't change their plan soon enough, or implement it fast enough.
Now, your defense is we don't know what advice the gov't were getting, and we can't assume they talked to anyone who was as aware as a civilian like me was of the range of options available. That's just hard to believe, and the facts don't bear it out either. There's that report from Reuters and the other one from the Times that do in fact say they heard different opinions on the matter. So in fact, we can safely assume they were given a range of options and that they waffled around from Plan A to Plan B, and didn't do much in the meantime to prepare for either plan.
But hey, if you want to wait another 18 months for an inquiry can conclude what is already clear to anyone who bothers to pay attention, then that's up to you.
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