manifestations, at least on the evidence of their social media presences and output. Their messaging and rhetoric are similar, they pop up on each others' timelines, and conspiracy theories abound, from claims of a fake epidemic to a push for one world government to antivax to 5G and beyond.
It's not helped by the fact that the UK government's mismanaged the crisis from the very start.
Johnson was initially very blasé and gung ho about COVID, not least because his adviser Dominic Cummings and his gang of elite "superforecasters" favoured a quest for mythical spontaneous "herd immunity", which is scientific nonsense.
This changed somewhat after Johnson was hospitalized with COVID, and he seems to have suffered far more that Trump did (assuming Trump ever had it in the first place). At the same time, the scale of casualties such a strategy would lead to were becoming more apparent, and became politically unacceptable.
The errors have been many - being slow to issue advice to the public, slow to call for changes to public behaviour, giving confusing and mixed messages, failure to screen airline passengers on entry to the UK, Cummings disobeying lockdown measures to travel hundreds of miles while infected and being seen to suffer no sanctions for doing so, slow and inefficient distribution of everything from ventilators to personal protective equipment to tests, bodged procesing of what tests there were, all while handing out incredibly overpriced contracts to Tory donors and apparatchiks, many running firms that had no prior experience or expertise. England still lacks a fully functioning test and trace system. Financial help to individuals and businesses that underpinned the early lockdowns was relatively adequate, but is now being severely squeezed. None of this was helped by a drive by the UK government and its tame media in late summer to persuade those who'd adapted to working from home that it was now their "duty" to return to their offices.
All the time, the UK government's countermeasures have lagged behind those chosen by the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and latterly some of the local authorities in the north of England, and all complain that they've had little meaningful communication with the central UK government, which holds the purse strings.
The upshot has been that we have the worst of all worlds, where cagey reaction for fear of the economic consquences has prolonged the pandemic and led to even worse economic consequences in prospect.
On the ground, I can only speak about where I am, in my corner of Scotland. People on the streets and in shops are generally responsible, and it's rare to see people not wearing masks where it would be appropriate. The early hard lockdown in the spring was well observed, with people self-isolating, roads deserted and relatively few people in shops. Some people relaxed too much during the summer and held gatherings with little or no social distancing, with predictable results. We do have a pretty adequate test and trace system (separate from England's), but even that has had problems dealing with later local outbreaks.
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