Yves here. Richard Murphy is writing from a UK vantage, where the lockdowns have been harder and longer-lived than in the US, stimulus has been less lavish, but the UK is also further along in getting citizens vaccinated (although the US ranks better on the proportion fully vaccinated, at 26%, versus 19% for the UK):
Another factor in the UK’s favor is as far as I can tell, vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax sentiment is lower than the US, so they don’t appear to be approaching vaccination stall speed, as we are here. So in the UK, it might be true that managing the reopening id the trickier problem now than managing Covid, particularly with Brexit and poor conditions in Europe as additional headwinds (both their Covid surges and their insufficient support spending). But the proximity to Europe also increases the odds of yet another contagion landing, particularly one that can do a decent job of escaping the vaccines (a variant of concern in India has two mutations on the spike protein which make it particularly hazardous-looking).