I was responding to a specific statement, which does seem to frame this policy-making as a conflict between "everyone" leading a normal life versus "saving the elderly":
I see this as a false choice, a fabricated scenario. How would a "normal life" trade-off even work? In what universe can we escape these social and economic consequences?
To reach the stage where thousands of "mainly elderly" people died, the virus would have to infect hundreds of thousands of non-elderly people. Yes, some of those non-fatal cases might be mild, but not all of them. Your'e going to have tens of thousands of very sick people staying home and/or overwhelming the medical system and affecting every commercial sector by their absence.
If you refuse to suspend concerts, conventions, campaign rallies, football games, and all other large gatherings, everyone gets sick. There's no magic formula whereby 98% of the population goes about its business untouched and the unlucky feeble 2% die off in a corner somewhere.
If it's too costly to suspend normal activities, then you're guaranteeing there's not going to be any normality for quite some time to come, because COVID-19 will spread that much faster and that much farther.
I don't think works that way, though. As the article says,
China has made its decision, prioritising control of the virus with draconian measures that at one point led to movement restrictions on half a billion people. Factories were closed, travel was banned and quarantines were enforced with drones. It worked but the world is now counting the economic cost in manufacturing shortages.
As Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, pointed out today, the epidemic in Wuhan peaked with 5 per cent of the population infected. British contingency plans are preparing for a “reasonable worst case” scenario in which 80 per cent of the population is infected.
“In terms of the number of lives lost, there is a massive difference, hundreds of thousands of lives difference, if you can contain it to less than 5 per cent,” Mr Hunt said.
I don't see many places, and certainly not the UK or the USA, introducing Chinese-style measures and locking down whole cities, effective though this was and no matter how many hundreds of thousands of lives it saves.
That doesn't mean I see them doing nothing, though. Rather, I see them making a whole series of specific decisions -- when, and for how long to close schools and universities, whether or not to close public transport, including taxis, car-sharing and Uber, and in what circumstances (the London Underground must be a wonderful method for spreading airborne viruses), whether or not to prohibit public gatherings (not just sporting events, but political demonstrations and acts of public worship), whether or not to close bars and restaurants, and so on.
The UK seems already to have taken the strategic decision to have accepted the fact that up to 80% of the population will, eventually, be infected, to try to delay that as long as possible, and to use the time to try to get preparations in place for when we do have a mass epidemic.
Nothing's going to be normal then, I agree, but I don't see the UK, at least, going into a state of complete lock-down to try to contain the virus, since it would be politically impossible.
t.co
