Britain - or England anyway - have screwed up the whole thing from the get go. It took Boris to nearly die himself to take the thing seriously.
At the end of the day, nothing is going to work unless people strictly self police themselves and their area of responsibility ie household or workplace. The only alternate is martial law with soldiers on the street enforcing the rules like the Gestapo. In March and April when its damp and wet and a bit of a novelty, many will comply. But as soon as temperatures rise of course people will want to go outside.
Not only that, there have been so many mixed messages, contradictions, knee jerk reactions, illogical rules, stupidity and inconsistency that for many they are just weary of it all, can't believe or trust anything the government says and feel its time to screw everything and go back to normal.
Here in BC, we never had an official lock down, but all non essential businesses and public places were closed mid March, many people worked from home and all gatherings over 5 people outside immediate family or workplace were banned. The thing is people here for the most part policed themselves and respected what the health authority said. End result, we had under 100 cases a day at the peak and down to under 10 a day by June. This has doubled through July with mostly kids going out partying causing outbreaks, but is still a pretty good curve. We have had under 200 people die so far in total, of those more than 80% are from care homes. We also closed the borders and implemented 14 day quarantine from mid March when it all started (not a couple of months later when the damage was done) - and is still in place - but largely due to the chaos south of the border without explicitly getting into a slagging match with our biggest trade partner. 3.5 months later, life is pretty much back to normal with social distancing and hand sanitizer everywhere. Mask wearing is not enforced, but many wear them in public, particularly enclosed spaces like shops and transit. The only thing we can't do apart from travel without quarantining is have conferences and large gatherings like sporting events & concerts. Fortunately BC is a large and beautiful province for people to enjoy a great holiday without going overseas.
Amazing what can be done when there is a clear unequivocal reasonable message from the government and people are mostly responsible enough to police themselves because they recognize it is for the good of everyone else.
Im a proud Englishman, but I have to say I am very impressed with Canadians and feel very grateful for Canada to be my home at the moment - well, BC anyway. Sadly, it seems that sort of society is largely disappearing in the UK.
