Yeah, it’s going to be extremely complicated unpicking all the details about who did “best”. Especially with each country being unique in lots of important and relevant ways. My pain point is that the UK seems to have done better than most at maintaining relative normality while all also avoiding the health service getting overwhelmed. And as someone who incorrectly predicted that this wasn’t possible (with delta, anyway) I have to hold my hand up.
Welcome to the dark side
I have a lot of complaints about the 2020 approach and complained a lot - mostly about things I still moan about, from taking action too late, to pointless travel restrictions, to poor sick pay etc. The tiers were ill conceived and more or less irrelevant - as demonstrated when London was reopened just as Alpha was kicking off and cases were rising.
On the broad approach in 2021, I didn't see much wrong with it. Life does have to go on, even for school kids and young adults. It's an ugly truth but once we put all the eggs in the (extremely effective) vaccine basket, we basically define a level of deaths and hospitalisations that was deemed acceptable to society, despite being agony for the people involved.
We could have waited for better antivirals - now expected mid 2022 in useful quantity, but still anyone's guess when Delta hit. We could wait for a variant specific vaccine - maybe Q3 2022, but of what variant?
Reopening is a tough game. Harder for some countries than others. Miserable for those who remain clinically vulnerable, who see the world moving on without them. But yeah, if the UK gets away with it, without crashing the NHS for months - I reckon we'll have done ok - even if it cheers up our neighbours (including those with similar death rates and hospitalisations) to think we're plague Island.