To be fair to the NHS, it hasn't done too badly considering the various Conservative governments in recent decades have vacillated between apathy and hostility. In particular, the current government has strong connections to private US health profiteers hungry for unfettered access to a huge market. Brexit and covid have only exacerbated the issue, with unabashed cronyism that makes the current Canadian Liberals look like angels by comparison, and huge labour shortages caused by a sudden loss of access to continental Europe's lower paid workers.
(Fortunately for the Tories, the Labour party is a total disaster, beset by infighting, a total inability to go on the offensive, and a political strategy that seems to mostly involve sitting on the sidelines to watch the dumpster fire, hoping that voters eventually move to Labour by default. Naturally, this isn't working, and the NHS is struggling as a result. The Liberal Democrats recently won a byelection in a staunchly Conservative seat, suggesting that voters want change, but not change to Labour in its current form.)
All that derails aside, I think we can learn a lot from data coming from the UK, as they have similar demographics, a somewhat similar climate, and similar attitudes toward vaccination etc. Where things differ is the governmental response, which have variously been much more lax and more strict on lockdowns, desiring to stay hands off until things become catastrophic, at which point they shut down almost entirely.
They also have a much higher percentage of initial Astra-Zeneca vaccine uptake, which can be watched when we start to see meaningful hospitalization and death numbers develop as Omicron establishes itself as the dominant strain.
