A few weeks ago there was a flurry of posts along the lines of, "Yeah, but imagine how much worse it would have been under Corbyn" or, less contentiously, "No government could have done much better in the circumstances".
In my reply, I pointed out that Corbyn would have taken his role as a public servant more seriously than Johnson, and that he would have listened to international experts more, since he is no believer in English exceptionalism. At the time I mentioned there was a clip of Corbyn accusing the government of complacency a week before lockdown was finally imposed but I couldn't find it. Well, finally it's resurfaced in my Twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1239257257466122247
The comments underneath from the usual right-wing morons have not aged well. I wonder if a single one of them has the humility to accept that Corbyn was right to be concerned.
I remember this period vividly, as it was permeated with a sense of disorientation and dread; I recall several conversations with my partner where neither of us could believe how slowly the government was responding. To understand why this is so crucial, checkout Led By Donkeys' timeline of the crisis:
https://timeline-of-failure.com/
One of the entries for March 16 (the day after the Corbyn clip) states that:
At least 25,000 lives could have been saved if the government had introduced lockdown just a week earlier, says Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the government's pandemic scientific advisors.
This makes complete sense, given the nature of exponential growth.
Counterfactual history is a tricky business, but there is good evidence that a Labour government, led by Corbyn, would have saved more than 20000 lives.