Here in the UK, the government although appeared to be a bit slow on introducing measures did act appropriately, building temporary hospitals at a huge cost etc. Yes in hindsight was a bit of a waste of money as they were rarely if not actually used, the opposition as is their constitution to argue everything they did was the wrong way, however, in my opinion they did good job under the circumstances & do not believe any other government could have done better.
I think the main criticism of the government isn't so much what they did, but how they went on about it.
The hospitals were a complete waste. The government's experts projections pointed to them being required. Sadly, the Government's actions before the pandemic meant as well that there was no one to man them fully... so building hospitals without staff that can man them is the definition of a complete waste. But of course, nothing is the fault of the B word unless it is Brussels.
There was corruption in plenty of contracts... where companies offered to manufacture stuff to assist with Covid, but since they're not on party's donor list, were simply ignored. I mean... they asked the manufacturer of some shoddy vaccum cleaners to make medical equipment but never bothered to look at companies that could indeed do it and get it approved for medical use.
And when it came to the Test and Trace app, their first idea was to create an election winning machine to record even more of our habits by recording where we were and whether we spent money there... luckily Apple and Google gave them the middle finger and a couple of millions down the road they had to revert back to using what was allowed by the tech companies. This was admitted by the guy speccing the app in front of MPs and considering he had his job assisting Government because he's great at targeted lies based on data, it made perfect sense for him to get a nicer tool.
And before this gets political, the opposition would probably have done 10 times worse, whilst deposing their leader and getting sued in court for all sorts of shenanigans.
One thing must be said though, looking at the vaccine roll out in other countries, the UK's was top notch (though I didn't follow it in Asia). It was the definition of an assembly line and it showed in the number of people they were going through. It took longer to wait for the effects of it than to actually get it in your arm.
The other good thing was that the restrictions weren't, although some don't agree, as draconic as other countries. Portugal made private education establishments illegal and Spain prohibited walking past the nearest food shop, as examples. Although we had the odd case of police overreach, overall was much better.
