[nomadking]

Originally Posted by Hugh

With the tests that weren’t available, and they had to get them out of hospital very quickly to make beds available?

Thoughtless unprofessional negligent medics not doing tests that weren’t widely available...

The tests WERE available. It's just that they were kept for just people showing symptoms. No different to many other countries, and that DOES include South Korea.

In South Korea as in Italy, an early case of COVID-19 was identified when a medical officer followed their intuition, rather than the official guidelines, on testing.

...
Like the patient named Mattia in Italy, the woman had no known links to Wuhan, the Chinese province where the disease was first identified. And as in Italy, the doctors’ decision to recommend a test went against guidelines at the time to test people who had been to China or been in contact with a confirmed case, said Korea Medical Association’s Choi Jaewook.

Even Germany and South Korea had shortages of PPE and testing kits.


An independent report placed the UK, 2nd best prepared for a pandemic.

But even as the risk of such outbreaks increases, no country — the United States included — is fully prepared to respond to a deliberate or accidental threat with the potential to wipe out humanity, according to a report assessing the efforts of 195 countries.
...

Thailand, for example, is the only non-high-income country to rank in the top tier overall — sixth highest overall after the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and Canada.

Another independent report found that the NHS had a £100m stockpile of items ready for a pandemic. Although it didn't say what items.

Link

It says that in the last few years the government spent £424 million on stockpiling Tamiflu in case of a flu pandemic. However, there is little agreement as to how effective the drug is, particularly in preventing complications and deaths from flu.

From 2007 report by British Thoracic Society.

In the event of a pandemic, the following additional care
settings may have to be considered as the threshold for hospital
admission rises:
treatment of patients in the community (who would
normally receive care from a GP) by other healthcare
professionals (nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, etc) following
treatment guidance laid out in this publication and using
prescription-only medicines according to Patient Group
Directives
treatment of patients in their own homes or in temporary
intermediate care facilities by a GP, following treatment
guidance laid out in this publication when, under normal
circumstances, such patients would have been admitted for
hospital care

A "What If" article from 2018.

As history attests, deaths probably would not be evenly distributed across populations. The Spanish flu saw a 30-fold mortality difference in various countries. In India, for example, the virus took out 8% of the population, while less than 1% died in Denmark. Similarly, during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, deaths in Mexico exceeded those in France by a factor of 10.
Experts believe the disparities were influenced by a number of factors, including a population’s prior exposure to similar influenza strains and genetic vulnerabilities of certain ethnic groups (New Zealand’s native Maori, for example, were seven times more likely to die after contracting the 1918 flu than the global average).