The UK had an explicit policy of letting as many people get infected as they can as quickly as possible
I will point out actually. This isn't true. The UK had a mitigation strategy. The purpose was not 'herd immunity' this was a miscommunication. Herd immunity was a side-effect of the mitigation strategy. One believed to be beneficial in the long run.
Sweden has a very similar strategy as the UK originally had.
https://twitter.com/BBCr4today/status/1238390547783528448
March 13th.
It's not playing for some reason, but I get the point by the caption. What do you think you are hearing in this?
'Reduce the peak' is the key point. The UK had a mitigation strategy not a policy to let as many people get infected as quickly as possible. That was not the purpose of the strategy. The purpose of the strategy was to
mitigate the effects of the virus. To try and control the amount of people infected by the virus and to protect the most vulnerable. The consequence was a lot more people over time would be infected, which they believed would be beneficial in the long run. I will mention that they did clarify this a number of times. The purpose wasn't to let the virus loose through the population.
And the reason they did a u-turn on it was because of Neil Ferguson's model that modelled a mitigation strategy, a suppression strategy and no strategy. His model showed that a mitigation strategy might cost 250,000 lives and no strategy at all would cost 500,000 lives.
I will also mention actually, as I have already done a number of times already, early on in fact. It didn't come from Boris Johnson, no matter how much of a buffoon you think he is, it came from the scientific advisers. In much the same way, Sweden's strategy didn't come from the Swedish politicians, it came from the scientific advisers.