The UK government did a lot wrong, but we still don't know what a "competent strategy for social distancing and containment" actually looks like.

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.