If saving lives is the end goal then countries that took it seriously from the start and had a competent strategy for social distancing and containment are still better off.
Barely a month ago Boris was promising a normal Christmas.
Half the time we look at a country as being a good example of this, things fall apart within a few weeks... When a single person can infect hunreds of others, or none, there's a lot of randomness that models cannot easily account for. There are still a large number of infections where we don't know how the person was infected.
:)
I’m very glad NZ is COVID free but they got lucky by not having much community spread before the first lockdown and closing the border, and they are lucky by geography in this case.
What the UK has gone through is unique to the UK and it is hard to easily compare it to other countries. It's bad, don't get wrong, and I wish that travel lockdowns would have happened sooner, but let's not ignore a huge amount of relevant data so you can have a dig.