At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, UK government advisers suggested that 20,000 UK deaths would be a good outcome. Today, the tally sits at more than 45,000. Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths writes in The Conversation that there is no doubt the UK has been hit hard by coronavirus, and has the second-largest number of deaths worldwide, trailing only the USA which has five times the population and 111,139 deaths. Where did the UK go wrong? And how will it prevent further deaths if a secondary pandemic wave occurs as it reopens? Modelling and epidemiology give us some clues.