TL:DR

After 3 months of saying that per capita figures were mislead and made "small countries look worse" the FT has now decided that per capita figures are, after all, OK https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1265885480144470023

It's also interesting that they say "we were late locking down" as an undisputed fact, and do not say post the number of deaths or infections on the date of lockdown for comparision

A month ago I did my own trawling for the dates and the UKs was at the time within a few days of other EU countries at the same stage of their outbreak fatalities wise.

It looks worse now BTW because our figures have been updated backwards and so the number of deaths you look up now for the date of lockdown isn't the same as the number of deaths known at the time on the date of lockdown

The most interesting point in this thread for me is the spread across the UK, it got everywhere.

Which of course means if you believe lockdown was late that:
The Tories
SNP
Welsh Labour
DUP
SF

All failed

though of course the FT only criticises Boris. Hmmm

Personally I think with the data available at the time I can't see us having possibly locked down much earlier.

Quite simply you need enough dead to warrant such a massive curtailing of freedoms and to have the public buy in to follow it.

And all the revisionism in the world won't change the fact that there is no evidence our scientists were saying "lock down earlier" No one has every provided this, they simply insist that the gov should have overrode scientists because "hindsight" Which is clearly stupid