This seems really weird. What made the NZ response (and ROK, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, etc) work is that they have prevented infection arriving via quarantine.

The other big UK mistake was loosening restrictions before the elimination of community transmission. https://twitter.com/juliamacfarlane/status/1354375431949053953

If you can get rid of community transmission then you can use test, trace and isolate to prevent it coming back from your non-community cases. Then you ensure it can't be reintroduced from other places that still have community transmission.

I should add that massive racism means we compare ourselves to NZ and Australia, but not to South Korea or Vietnam or Thailand or Taiwan (SK and Taiwan are especially good comparators, because they're well-connected densely-populated countries, like the UK).

Learning some lessons from successful East Asian democracies would be really good for the UK.

Like, South Korea has the second-cheapest railway construction in the world (after Spain). Shouldn't we learn from their innovations?

Tokyo is an enormously rich city that lots of people move to, and doesn't have a housing crisis and has lots of affordable housing. Isn't that worth learning from?