Okay firstly SB you choose countries that will favor your argument. Strangely you omitted France, Italy, Spain which are more of a representation as to size and population to the UK (as well as distance)
However, I will attempt to go through the interesting ones.
Denmark… Don’t be silly they only have about 5 million people?
Singapore… sorry, don’t know enough about coronavirus there.
Hong Kong… really? Have figures overseen by the Chinese government? I would always be skeptical about what comes out of there, however, a highly populated place so would have been good to collect information.
Let us discuss the ones we can trust…
Germany
It would be the nearest example to us and the most interesting case.
It has been well documented that Germany has a very good health care system as well as those 100 labs compared to our 4. It has amazing Pharma manufacturing and can deal with producing stuff very quickly.
Do you believe that Germany gets its testing kits from China? I bet they don’t rely on China as much as we do?
There have also been questions on how they record deaths. Plenty of articles will tell you this.
Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, the federal government’s health agency, has said the true mortality rate in Germany is probably higher than the officially recorded number. He reported on some tentative evidence that the number of new infections might be slowing down, but said it was too early to make firm conclusions.
https://www.ft.com/content/849308f8-75bc-11ea-ad98-044200cb277f
However, as I said Germany is a good example on the way forward. We are working closely with them… I think it was ‘Farrar’ (sorry for the wrong spelling). The medical director who confirmed this last week.
Finally, my mate works in German and he says they all pay into the medical system.
South Korea
This is an interesting example because they have high concentrations of people in a small space.
I recall reading a piece about the social and cultural differences which have helped them. A good example is when their government tells them to social distance or stay at home, the obey unlike people in the UK who often break the rules?
They also tested very quickly and managed to produce affordable testing kits. Whereas we have not been able to do that.
Funnily the best testing kits seem to be produced there and we may end up importing from them.
South Korea comes across as almost immune to it, which in itself is strange?
I also still think there are BAME links to consider in all of this.
I think in the end it comes down to political, social and cultural differences in each country. I don’t think it is fair/correct to compare us to another country. As long as we learn by our mistakes and take note of other successes then surely that is the way forward.
