There is more to Matt's article, things he does not say nor even allude to
But there are things to say about his general observation.

It's not completely incorrect and irrelevant, it's just bare bones and offers no explanation.

The variant in India is mild and highly infectious, because more variants have popped up there than elsewhere in their huge unfettered population dueand its main consequence ; more cell division/copy errors. Hence unfettered natural selection has driven the virus right at its optimal directions of high infectiousness, low lethality. And that's what they got.

I think India have done well, overall. We should import their variant to defeat ours , it acts more like a vaccine than a virus!

As you say, blundering about from pillar to post, seemingly without taking any notice of the results of each separate experiment,

You would need to be in the operations room to know how feedback is being treated. From outside the planning room, it can look mysterious, I know, but believe me, they are war gaming each step. We cannot see, and they don't tell us, it is frustrating, but that is how these things are done.

You have a lot more faith in the government than I do! A "war room" run by Excel! What you describe is what should be, but unfortunately is not, what is actually happening.

There have been far too many schoolboy errors and mistakes for this to be correct.

...
And the solution to the World's CORONAVIRUS crisis… wait for it DADA!
Intentionally infect the whole world with India's Coronavirus strain, since it has optimal transmissibility and low lethality. You can call it a vaccine if it helps.

You may mean "TA - DAH", tho "DADA" does fit the UK's policy.

Look, we largely agree. Let It Rip would have been and remains the best policy to travel fast thru high transmission to low lethality. Maybe tinkering with this variant or that variant would optimise, tho I trust Natural Selection over Government Scientist Selection.

...
And the solution to the World's CORONAVIRUS crisis… wait for it DADA!
Intentionally infect the whole world with India's Coronavirus strain, since it has optimal transmissibility and low lethality. You can call it a vaccine if it helps.

You may mean "TA - DAH", tho "DADA" does fit the UK's policy.

Look, we largely agree. Let It Rip would have been and remains the best policy to travel fast thru high transmission to low lethality. Maybe tinkering with this variant or that variant would optimise, tho I trust Natural Selection over Government Scientist Selection.

I know, I'm as surprised as you are, we came to similar conclusions for different reasons.
Matt Ridley's article was hopeless. So I went around that and determined from first principles that the infectious but benign variant in India came about in part due to a lack of artificial selection and lockdown; random selection will eventually favour variants that increase transmissibility and reduce lethality. This happened in India since it is so big, but not here because this country is too small. If we let it rip here, with high lethality, well, we're too small to quickly converge on highest transmissibility and lowest lethality, evolution would have been too slow, and the NHS would have been swamped, as it almost was. It needed a gigantic, uncontrolled population like India to evolve it to highest transmissibility , lowest lethality

re: I trust Natural Selection over Government Scientist Selection.

If you were in India, where evolution proceeds at warp speed, that would correct. But we do not.

Excel!

You don't know what you're talking about, the problem was not Excel. It was GIGO.