[St Charles Owl]

Of course population matters to a degree but not when you are using it to lump together nations in the manner that you have there. I'd look more at the effects on mortality during the pandemic and it shows you Britain and Spain have suffered the most, but drill down and Spain has a significantly older population and a culture of generations sharing accommodation (like Italy in that respect) . So adjusting for age structure is important too.

When you remove the nations we shouldn't be getting compared with, and look more at the detail the UK is clearly suffering catastrophically from COVID. If you seriously think we are genuinely 9th in Europe then I don't know what else I can say.

I agree that a lot goes into analysing the numbers, but your statement was that only the totals count because our numbers are bigger than most countries. Yes the UK is 9th and 16th in the metrics I used and yes we can discount those countries like San Marino and Andorra from comparison, so as I said I was comparing to other larger Western Europe countries when I named those we were behind.

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Population density does not capture the finer points of how people gather together though. Take Hong Kong,Seoul or Taipei which are all high pop density areas but they have all limited covid 19 cases because their governments have successfully protected people.... but also because they take into consideration the connections between communities, healthcare access etc etc. Rather than just looking at crowding. Nor has density particularly predicted the diseases course in the US.

Seriously SCO?

You still haven't checked Taiwan out have you?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronaviru...ry/taiwan/

Cases - 842
Deaths - 7 (seven, yes, seven) . Last one recorded in May last year.
Recovered - 731.

Don't ask me about the exact maths, but whether its 7 or 700, it makes our clowns look like complete and utter f*ckwits, either side of the pond.

Nobody is bothered about wearing masks, standing 2m (or 6') apart, everyone is doing wtf they normally do. Sports, work, shopping, parties, you name it they are doing it. We're sat at home getting pissed on our own until we've eaten all the fresh stuff and drunk our own booze and we need to go back to the local supermarket, and hope the local super spreaders aren't all in there at the same time.

Taiwan
Population - 23.6 million (about 1/3rd ish give or take, of us)
Relative Land Mass - we are 7x bigger in the UK, you work your own relative land mass out

All these places you mention have absolutely done a better job, so why? For starters people in those countries typically wear a mask at the slightest sign of any transmittable disease and they generally do as their leaders instruct them to. You could also suggest their numbers are not accurate, which goes for a lot of countries. Ritchie said it above, in the Western world we have seen protests about lockdowns, refusal to wear a mask and a refusal to socially distance whether it be protests or family gatherings and churches. The UK is doing better than the US, but is not much worse than Italy, Spain and France as similar examples.

You say these countries have successfully protected their people, how did they do that and why has no major Western country managed the same thing? Australia and New Zealand have seen great success but both completely closed their borders to both citizens and foreigners something we didn't do and still haven't. You mention supermarkets but surely people in Taiwan still had to go food shopping, why didn't it spread there like it has across the West? My point is still the same, Western governments almost across the board have failed to stop this pandemic and virtually all deserve criticism, sure with Trump and the Tories at the top of the pile but they are not the only ones. Western countries, and in particular a lot of politicians put their economies ahead of the pandemic, especially early on and yet once the cat was out the bag they then instigated measures that crippled economies anyway, again what did Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan do differently? I don't know the answer, and I am sure its a multitude of things including their basic freedoms for starters but we need to be looking at it because this won't be the last pandemic we see.