Not introducing a quarantine right at the start of the pandemic went together with the mindset that this would be just like a flu pandemic. You're accepting that the infection will quickly become established nationally, so that there is no point in ramping up testing and tracing capacity (which you don't intend to use widely in the community) or stopping people coming into the country (which will just delay the inevitable). The trouble is, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By believing that a national epidemic cannot be stopped and failing to take the early action that might make a difference, you make it inevitable. And because the outbreak is growing exponentially, there is only a narrow window in which to take decisive action before things spiral out of control. The countries that successfully handled the pandemic made different assumptions right at the beginning, and acted on them. This would not be like flu, and needed to be handled by the traditional techniques of test, trace and isolate, used with great success against other infections.
Where the responsibility for all this lies will be determined by the eventual public enquiry, assuming it's not a whitewash. Earlier governments did not make adequate plans for any pandemic, but especially for one that was something other than influenza. When this one hit, they really only had a flu plan to fall back on. The publicly visible official UK scientific advisors seem not to have been thinking far outside the flu box in the early weeks, though there were some high profile dissenting voices elsewhere, and the full story of what was discussed in private has yet to emerge. From what has come out, SAGE scientists were extremely concerned by late February, and presented their chilling predictions in early March. A great deal could still have been salvaged, and probably tens of thousands of deaths avoided, if decisive action had been taken right then. It wasn't until the scientists had taken it upon themselves to model lockdown scenarios that the Government seems to have been prodded into belated, indecisive action. Now we are relaxing the lockdown, probably prematurely, and after wasting much of the time it bought us in failing to develop a fully functional testing and tracing system. Border quarantine would make a lot more sense if we had a better handle on the domestic situation, as the case in South Korea.
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