Britain's approach looked superficially similar, but below the waterline, it was anything but.
My main point was that it is a good idea to compare versions of the ECDC document so that you can see the evolution of the orthodox thinking, and then compare that with what happened in the UK. And that such supra-national guidelines leave plenty of wiggle room for individual nations to adjust their measures to suit local circumstances. Those include capacity issues and issues about when things are 'no longer practical'. Also, note that something you quoted uses the word mitigate - thats the old language of pandemic plans and is entirely compatible with the UK approach before plans had to change around March 16th. Mitigate is the crap 'push the curve down a bit' plan, that falls well short of suppression. Your analysis seems to feature extremely favourable interpretations of these and other phrases and concepts when the ECDC uses them, in stark contrast to the interpretations you make in regard UK moves. Which misses the point of how most of the crap things the UK did were entirely compatible with the language and concepts enshrined in these guides, if we pay attention to the dates each edition were published and allow for the UK dragging its heels and being some days behind.
So no, it is not the case at all that the UK approach was only superficially similar looking. It was compatible with and patially a product of the same world as the ECDC documents represent. This is not the same as me claiming that the UK would get a special medal for being the 'best in class' when it came to how seriously it treated everything and what capacity it had to achieve in full everything that the ECDC docs recommend. Far from it, we were pretty crappy. Germany were much better on at least 2 fronts, testing and contact tracing, maybe more, but its still too early for me to really know how well they have done with infection control in hospitals and care homes. But both nations approaches were compatible with these docs and the existing orthodoxy. Because the orthodoxy allowed for countries with limited diagnostics capabilities, it advises them where to prioritise where they can, and we did a poor job with those priorities too, but its still the same universe of thinking.
You have to read between the lines a bit with documents like the ECDC ones. And you have to understand what triggers countries use to move to another phase of the long established plans. For example you mention that we abandoned various things before they became unfeasible, but I dont think you have considered how these feasibility assumptions are baked into national plans, in the same way certain triggers for moving to another phase are. Again I'm not defending the UK system on this, a lot of our plans werent granular enough, but there was usually some internal logic to them that was compatible with mainstream thinking on modern pandemic responses.
Here is an example from the ECDC 5th editions surveillance section, what should be done in scenario 2:
Case-based national surveillance and reporting should continue even in the face of increasing numbers of cases for as long as resources allow, at least until a clear description of the disease, severity spectrum and outcomes has been obtained.
The 'clear description of the disease' stuff is a perfect fit for the 'First few hundred (FF100)' clinical studies. And such studies are a big part of the initial 'containment' phase in UK plans, which is the phase where you actually try and test every case and hospitalise them.
I've also spoken before about how phase labelled 'contain' is often only really delay. I first learnt about this because it was one of the criticisms of the UK response to 2009 swine flu pandemic, that their contain phase should actually have been called a delay phase and communicated to the public as such. Well, such obfuscations were aline and well this time, and oh look, they are in the 5th edition of the ECDC doc too:
Containment measures intended to slow down the spread of the virus in the population are therefore extremely important as outlined below in the ‘Options for response’ and recent ECDC guidance documents
Scenario 1 describes a situation with multiple introductions and limited local transmission in the country. Despite the introductions there is no apparent sustained transmission (only second generation cases observed or transmission within sporadic contained clusters with known epidemiological links). In this situation, the objective is containment of the outbreak by blocking transmission opportunities, through early detection of imported and locally-transmitted COVID-19 cases in order to try to avoid or at least delay the spread of infection and the associated burden on healthcare systems. Delaying the start of local transmission will allow the current influenza season to end, freeing up some healthcare capacity. As of 2 March 2020, several EU/EEA countries had reported limited local transmission and were considered to be in this scenario.
That ECDC description of scenario 1 is not exactly a confident battle cry to genuinely contain and suppress the infection is it? It has failure, turning this into a delay rather than a contain phase, baked into it! And then more of the same into scenario 2:
In this situation, the objective remains to contain where practicable and otherwise slow down the transmission of the infection.
'Where practicable' is an example of just the sort of wiggle room that my point relies upon to be valid - this is where the action is, in phrases like that.
By scenario 3, we get the relatively feeble (compared to the lockdowns we actually ended up with) mitigation:
The objective at this stage is to mitigate the impact of the outbreak by decreasing the burden on healthcare systems and protect populations at risk of severe disease.
If you strip away the particular herd immunity rhetoric the UK used, scenario 3 was entirely compatible with our previous 'get the most vulnerable to stay at home but otherwise try to carry on' approach that was dead by March 16th. Likewise the final worst case end-game scenario 4:
The objective at this stage is still to mitigate the impact of the outbreak, decrease the burden on healthcare services, protect populations at risk of severe disease and reduce excess mortality.
Mitigate is not suppress, it is not the strong measures you are horrified we werent going to do, its the weak stuff Johnson originally favoured (that would still have featured some stronger stuff eventually, but quite a bit later, and for less time).
