It’s a harrowing balancing act that governments have to carry out in combating Coronavirus.
Let’s not forget that the economic effects of a strict lockdown are devastating and can even lead to disease and death themselves. So a government has to ask itself “how many more lives do we save from the virus by maintaining a lockdown, than we are losing to that lockdown’s impact?” If the answer is that the lockdown is saving fewer than it’s losing, then the choice is obvious: the lockdown must be raised.
But what if the numbers are close to each other? Which way should one jump? Or, to put the choice more starkly, how many lives is it reasonable to put at risk of CVid death, to avoid deaths through poverty and lack of care – or even lack of food?
This is particularly difficult given that it is often the same groups who are at jeopardy. The poorest are the most vulnerable to economic disruption, just as they are the virus itself. That makes it an extremely difficult balance to reach, a particularly delicate judgement call.
What makes the calculations even more fraught is that questionable motivations are often also at play.
In the US, for instance, Trump was anxious to avoid a lockdown and has done all he can to keep it as short and as lax as possible. Is that because he thinks the lockdown will cause more deaths than the virus? Well, with 114,000 dead and counting, that’s clearly not working out.
No. He has calculated, correctly I’m sure, that in order to stand a chance of re-election in November, he needs the economy to be booming. This strikes him as so desirable a goal that he feels that a few tens of thousands more deaths are a price worth paying. He’s trying to get the lockdown relaxed as quickly as possible to start restoring his much-damaged electoral chances.
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| Dominic Cummings, UK head of government (left) with his sidekick Boris Johnson, nominally Prime Minister |
In Britain, the situation is still murkier. The government there, led by its Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings but fronted by Boris Johnson, faces no election for four years. But it’s true that its marionette strings are pulled by some pretty large fortunes, and the sight of the economy crumbling with those fortunes suffering, must cause considerable pain.
As a result, it’s rushing to release people from lockdown long before it’s safe to do so, just as it got into it go far later than it should have done, and in far too relaxed a way.
Sadly, that’s where we hit the very nub of the government’s difficulties. Because its dilatoriness in getting going, and its hurry in getting out, have as expected given the UK one of the highest rates of Covid death in the world: 602 per million.
You might feel, “well, at least they saved the economy”. Except they haven’t. We read now that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of the richest nations, expects the UK to suffer the most severe impact of the pandemic on its economy.
Cummings and Johnson claim they want Britain to be world-beating. But they probably didn’t mean that it should rack up record numbers of deaths. Especially if they’re also running up the worst record of damage to the economy. That sounds like lose-lose.
Of course, the OECD might be wrong. Perhaps that’s what Cummings and Johnson are pinning their last hopes on. Because if it’s right, the outlook seems dire indeed.
Oscar Wilde defined a pessimist as “one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both”.
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| Oscar Wilde: as apt today as in his own time |
It looks like anyone still backing the Cummings government is fully a Wildean pessimist. It has delivered both evils, in spades. And these oddly trusting people continue to choose them…
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