Thread by @petermbenglish

I'm increasingly uncomfortable with all the "the government didn't care if x million of us die" tweets.

They fundamentally misunderstand the options. I've explained this partly here: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1246837…

1/

The sad truth is, Covid-19 is going to kill a lot of us.

The lockdown strategy is about slowing this down - but it won't make that big a difference.

Without herd immunity, if you don't get it in the next few weeks, you'll get it when it comes around again.
2/

And it will come around again.

So the lockdown is about not overstressing the NHS. It won't be as unpleasant,

And if the NHS isn't overwhelmed, people will get treatment for treatable conditions. Including some who'll recover from Covid-19 ONLY if they get ITU care.
3/

But the deaths avoided through the lockdowns will be relatively few, because it will be a long time before we get a vaccine; and by then, many of the people who will inevitably fail to survive Covid-19 will have succumbed.
4/

Of course it will have been worth saving those lives! But will it be worth it overall?

The economy will be hit harder than it has been since the 1930s.

Health and wealth are intimately associated.

So harming the economy harms health. It kills people.
5/

It's never "people or the economy". Harm the economy and you harm health and people die. Sorry to repeat myself there, but that's a fundamental, unavoidable, fact of life!

And the harm to the economy will persist for decades.
6/

So, glibly suggesting that the deaths from Covid-19 that might, perhaps, be avoided by harsher measures are evidence of callousness shows a failure to understand that the harsher measures would also kill people - and possibly more people than Covid-19 every would.
7/

Getting the right path is a very difficult tight-rope that politicians - and it has to be politicians - have to walk.

They say "we're following the science". But the fact is, science can only estimate the size of the trade-offs.
8/

It's a new virus. We don't know how it behaves, what sort of immunity (if any) it will induce. I've looked at some of the known unknowns here: peterenglish.blogspot.com/2020/04/what-s…
9/

Clever models and computer systems can do a lot; but there are huge error margins in the epidemiology, and the scale of the impact of Covid-19.
10/

And economics is hardly an exact science, either. We don't know just how bad the hit to the economy will be - just that it will be ginormous.
11/

So it's extremely difficult.

That's not to say the UK government has covered itself in glory. You wouldn't expect that troupe of vainglorious, lying, self-serving Brexity ideologues to be good at anything.

But on Covid-19 while the communications have been terrible…
12/

…the decisions might turn out not to be the worst they could have been.

Covid-19 will kill a lot of people. And so will the hit to the economy.

The economic harm will affect all the world.

But I'm not entirely pessimistic.
13/

Maybe - just maybe, if we all work hard at it - we can elect governments that care for the populations they serve, as they pretend to; and not just the richest two or three percent, as the governments of the UK and USA do at present.
14/

Maybe - just maybe - we can have policies that work for everybody. A society in which we all contribute our fair share. A society in which everybody gets a secure income…
15/

…A society in which we don't let millionaires' propaganda make us so terrified that somebody might get something they don't deserve that we create punitive arrangements for the poor, that keep them down, and cause massive child poverty.
16/

The rich establishment is excruciatingly powerful; and they will leverage their power to become even more so as a result of the economic harm that Brexit and Covid-19 will wreak on the UK.
17

But the rich establishment is not invincible.

Unless we succeed in supporting the poorer members of society after Brexit and Covid-19, the UK will become a terrible place.

We must not let that happen.

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