Prestige Worldwide wrote: ↑Tue Oct 20, 2020 8:40 am
Top comment on first covid article i could find on Guardian
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Have seen so much comment BTL of late equating making a choice between "citizens vs economy" as somehow a "Tory thing". This is so hilariously misguided it's untrue – as if the two were separable. The economy is not some concrete "thing", rather it's a term denoting the abstract set of systems, practices and choices that we all live in. Stop and ask yourself if you have ever complained about the death toll of austerity, and you'll get my drift. The death toll of the worst depression for hundreds of years, which is what we are currently ushering in, will make austerity look like a picnic, and is also (IMO) going to usher in a mental health crisis the like of which we've never seen before. But because these deaths and deleterious effects are less easily identifiable and thus less easily quantifiable, and are also "deferred" a bit further down the line, no one seems that bothered. Rather, the Covid numbers are now literally all that matters, it appears.
It's my honest opinion that the current strategy of endlessly deferring the inevitable passage of the virus through the population, in the vague hope that science will provide the magic bullet of a vaccine, is now at least worthy of a reassessment and reevaluation. Ity's surely clear now that viruses gonna virus, basically. So the question remains, to my mind: what's the objective now? What are we trying to achieve, other than delaying the inevitable?
I ask, because if you expand the question from pure epidemiology to a more holistic understanding of public health, then we are faced with a choice, admittedly a hard one, but an unavoidable choice nevertheless. An epidemiologist's views are valuable and more than worthy of consideration, but they ultimately see the population as effectively data points on a graph, and devise strategies to alter those numbers in various directions and with various aims.
But there are more considerations than simply mere numbers: what of the futures of our school leavers and graduates? What about the absolutely catastrophic levels of unemployment that are coming inexorably down the pipe? And the associated costs of that devastation in both economic terms and in lives? What about whole sectors of both the economy and life in general that are currently being tossed aside as unviable in the New Normal?: sport, the arts, hospitality, etc, not to mention the simple joy of having your family and friends around to your house - aren't these the very things that make working worth doing, and indeed life worth living? Are they now to be considered unavoidably (and in apparent perpetuity) casualties of a virus that, while of course highly contagious and lethal to a small percentage of people, is hardly the bubonic plague?
And before anyone steams in with the predictable and fatuous rejoinder "YoU dOn'T CarE AboUt LiVes", of course I do. But the fact is that Covid victims are very definitely not the only lives at stake now, far from it. All I am suggesting is that, IMHO, a hard but necessary conversation is long overdue about how to go forward, which entails 1) setting out a clear objective that does not ignore the reality that this virus cannot be eradicated, and also relatedly 2) an acknowledgment that we cannot endlessly (and ultimately futilely) kick the can down the road while incurring an increasingly cataclysmic (and in the case of some sectors likely irreversible) toll on the economy, because that is what ultimately underpins civil society itself.
There's no reason to my mind, for example, that we can't consider a strategy that focuses our efforts on protecting/shielding the small strata of people to whom Covid presents a clear and present danger – ie the elderly and those with co-morbidities – and let everyone else get moving again before the whole show gets crashed into a tree. The adoption of some general adjustments to behaviour – eg handwashing, masks in the supermarkets and on buses, etc – are also eminently plausible, and could and should be adopted without much resistance by all but the most cabin-in-the-woods libertarian crackpots.
But you simply cannot stop human beings mixing, mingling, bustling, hugging, bumping and grinding indefinitely, so this endless oscillation between lockdown, lockdown-lite, and arbitrary restrictions that are slowly killing the economy has to stop sometime – the only question is when.
I don't personally think it's "callous", "selfish", or indeed "trolling" to be thinking about these questions, quite the opposite in fact. It's just realistic."
