If we look at the countries that have suffered least from the pandemic, that all did the same thing, they locked down early, they locked down hard.
Our Government dithered until the last possible moment, which meant the country was thoroughly seeded with the virus from top to bottom.
Add on top of that a failure to manage or establish a decent track, trace and isolate program meant we would always be playing catch up.
On top of that, add in people taking the piss, despite lockdown rules many families and friends were still mingling in each others homes ensuring that the virus continually had some where nice to spread.
Then we, as people were starting to panic about the economy, we started to open up too soon, especially places where people could mingle in close proximity (in HK, despite low COVID spread in comparison to us in the West they found that Bars & Restaurants were the biggest spreaders of disease - though they were still far more lucky than we were.
Then sending the kids back to school, and university students too was always going to be a disaster, and we had warning from those countries that sent they're students back before we did - yet that flashing redlight was flaty ignored.
Now had we done the early and hard, we wouldn't have had this issue, The dithering, desperation, evasion and incompetence that have been the hallmarks of this Government's approach leaves us where we are. It wouldn't be so expensive if we learned and listened to what people were doing out east.
(I'll skip the issue of cutting our public institutions like the NHS to the bone, or failing to make use of local NHS and University Laboratories to do the track and trace, or the sidelining of dedicated PPE providers for mates and donors to the Tory party who'd never seen an item of PPE in their lives, or loosing moral authority by allowing Cummings to remain in post after his little walk about, or the sending of the sick to die in Care Homes increasing the spread and death rates there, or the decision to charge headlong forward with Brexit, a short extension until the pandemic was over would have been understandable and accepted. otherwise we'll be here all night)
On the subject of spending if we had done the right things we wouldn't have to be spending all this money now. Having said that, going large now is the right thing to do, interest rates are at an all time historical low, so borrowing is not to hurt us a much as it would say back in '08 and the Crash. As we currently stand Savings are fairly high, and interest rates low, investment is weak as is risk appetite, this is keeping the long term rates down low. The Markets need Investment to come from somewhere and at this stage it its a bit frightened, but is desperate, Now we've been here before and it is manageable.
The money to invest isn't going to come from the private sector, it needs to come from the state. Yes we will eventually have to bring it down (we've always we had the longest debt duration of any developed nation [about twice the average of other Western Nations]) but we can spread that across a longer period.
I just hope they sign a deal before Jan 1st or we will be in a far worse state.