Since Coronavirus hit, I’ve spent 5 weeks in England and the rest of the time in Germany. Thread follows on what I make of each country’s approach.

TLDR: public health response in much better than but British employers may be better equipped to mitigate future outbreaks

A lot has been said about ‘s decentralised approach to healthcare and how this helped with tracking, tracing, testing and isolating those who may have contracted the virus. Together with far greater hospital capacity, it certainly seems to have been effective.

But the UK govt could have adopted the same approach in England and chose not to. As @colinrtalbot has pointed out, many of the problems with the UK’s approach stem from the govt not making use of numerous public institutions for the very purposes for which they were designed

Local govt in England is responsible for public health - poor urban sanitation was a key reason councils were created in the first place. Local govt has responded to everything from cholera to AIDS but the UK centralised & outsourced its COVID response, which has been a disaster

was also much quicker to acknowledge the risk of airborne transmission. Merkel & Spahn were stressing the importance of face masks, doing stuff outdoors and ventilating indoor spaces whilst Johnson & Hancock were still focused primarily on hand washing and physical contact

In my experience, Germans are much keener to open windows than Brits, so they were preaching to the choir. But stressing airborne transmission early probably made it easier to introduce mandatory mask wearing and get people to organise things outdoors

The govt was also much better at getting the message across through ministerial and scientific briefings that were factual, honest and not politicised. And of course there were no Cummings-type incidents to undermine the entire strategy

However, UK employers may be better prepared for the next phase, because home working is more widely accepted. This may not be representative, but I work 50% for a UK university and 50% for a German institute and the difference in attitudes towards remote working is quite stark

Also I’m pretty sure Brits are much more likely to buy stuff online rather than go to shops. I was in a Newcastle’s main shopping centre last weekend to get new school shoes for the kids and there were hardly any other customers around

The other thing about the UK that’s impressed me since coming back 2 weeks ago has been one-way systems in shops and public spaces. People also stick to them (including me once I realised they existed). I didn’t notice anything like this in Berlin

So although the UK govt has made a complete mess of its response, the actions of British employers and society might help to prevent a second wave becoming enormous. Though their reluctance to go out may itself be partly due to not trusting the govt to take the right decisions

Apart from people wearing face masks, Germany seemed pretty much back to normal when I left a fortnight ago, even though cases were increasing. So that could well mean that another lockdown is on the way.