zlacker

It's reasonably plausible that what doomed efforts to keep Covid out of the UK (and the US too!) was travel from Italy, not China. Both countries had pretty decent contact tracing for cases linked to China and those people didn't spread it much, the initial outbreak cities of London and New York had substantial travel to the worst-affected region of Italy due to Fashion Week, and the first exported case from the UK detected in I think Singapore had direct ties to that.

Also, something definitely seems to have gone seriously wrong with Italy's response - they were detecting zero cases up until way too soon before their hospitals collapsed, which suggests they were doing a worse job of testing people hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms than even the US which had screwed up so badly it had an official policy of not doing so due to test shortages. Trouble is, Italy is currently run by the kind of technocrats the media likes, so there was no incentive to drag them through the mud. Instead the press spun other countries as worse because they weren't caught by surprise like Italy and so should've done better, without asking questions about how that surprise happened exactly.

>>makomk+(OP)
The hospitals never actually collapsed. I remember this at the time - there were many reports claiming they were about to totally run out of beds, and this kept being upgraded by commenters into "they have already run out". I kept asking for links that proved this and not getting any. Later some patients got moved to hospitals in Germany but there was some odd stuff about it: an Italian politician was demanding to know why patients were being moved there when there were nearby hospitals in Lombardy with spare beds.

Overall the idea the hospitals collapsed seems to have been a form of telephone game exaggeration, egged on by media reports claiming there were so many bodies they were piling up (actuality: undertakers were refusing to touch bodies because they are mostly old and had been told it would kill them).

What did collapse were care homes. But not because of COVID. Staff fled in fear, often back home to Eastern Europe before the borders closed, leaving too many elderly to die of dehydration and abandonment.