Coronavirus: Ignore those siren calls to lift the lockdown

Greylag geese in a sparsely populated Hyde Park inl London. Picture; AP.

Bravo Boris! Urged days ago to announce a speedy exit from lockdown, he has refused to be pushed. He’ll set out his plan next week amid signs that restrictions will be lifted only slowly.

This has taken courage. Big beasts in industry have been telling him to end lockdown now to avoid further damage to the economy.

Like every other country suffering from this pandemic, Britain faces a horrible choice between protecting the economy and safeguarding life and health. Its rate of death and serious illness from COVID-19 has been higher than most countries. The reason for that, along with other necessary criticisms about the government’s handling of this crisis, should wait until all the evidence is in.

Although the virus now seems under control, the prime minister’s caution is understandable. The rate of decline is still too small to permit a speedy lifting of restrictions without risking a fresh spiral in the infection rate.

Yet among people for whom damage to the economy outweighs all other considerations, there’s no acknowledgment of Johnson’s complex balancing act. For such people, lockdown must end immediately. Some of them claim, moreover, that there never was any need for it in the first place. The virus, they say (with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts) poses no serious threat because it only kills relatively few old people or those who would have died this year anyway.

By contrast, they say, Sweden has curbed the virus while suffering far fewer deaths than Britain, Italy or Spain without locking down its population, thus protecting its economy.

It is progressives who generally deny inconvenient truths which challenge their ideological dogma. If they hate the consequences of a situation, they decide to alter its analysis by rearranging the evidence. Yet the virus crisis has produced the same phenomenon among some conservatives, both in Britain and America, who are so quick to scorn it on the left.

A customer wears a face mask and gloves as she shops at a flower stall at Blackheath Farmers Market in London. Picture: Getty Images.

At the sharp end of this group are people who make a fetish of freemarket economics and the minimal state. A dismaying number of these “economy-firsters” have seized on certain statistical studies to claim that the virus death rate is lower than had been forecast and therefore COVID-19 is not so dangerous after all.

But all these statistical calculations are suspect because we still don’t know how many have been infected, nor how many have died.

What we do know for certain is what we can see for ourselves: that this virus is exceptionally infectious, and that a significant number of its victims suffer an alarmingly wide range of serious effects including organ failure, blood clots and strokes, as well as death. As Professor Nick Hart, who treated the prime minister, has put it: “COVID-19 is this generation’s polio.”

Sweden, which has been belatedly increasing its anti-virus restrictions and whose central bank forecasts that its economy will shrink by at least 7 per cent this year, actually ranks no lower than eighth in the world in deaths per million from COVID-19.

Its rate of 263 per million, just four places behind the UK at 427 per million, is far greater than the scores of 83, 41, and 39 per million for neighbouring Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

Meanwhile Israel, which quarantined all arrivals in early March and locked down the whole population soon afterwards, has a death rate of only 26 per million and is now about to relax a slew of restrictions.

Even so, there are significant concerns there that easing the lockdown so fast may result in the disastrous death rates that Israel has so far avoided.

Yet in Britain, “economy-firsters” have resorted to ever more absurd arguments. Now the virus is under control, they say, there’s no reason to continue the lockdown – ignoring the fact that it’s only because of the lockdown that it’s under control.

Death rates from the virus, they say, are lower than in flu epidemics. But that’s because countries have taken draconian steps to curb COVID-19.

Fewer people, they say, will die from the virus than from the devastating economic effects of the lockdown or from other diseases that are currently going untreated. Such tragic casualties are probable to some degree. However, if the virus got out of control, both the economy and the capacity of the NHS to treat other diseases would take a far bigger hit than now.

More loopy still are the motives some of these people are imputing to the prime minister. He’s keeping the lockdown because he wants to destroy the economy! He’s seizing upon the crisis to grab state control over people’s lives! He’s imposing a police state!

What?! Is the prime minister really likely to want to throw millions out of work and himself out of No 10? Is the ultra-liberal Boris really a combination of Mussolini and Stalin?

Others suggest slyly that his illness has made him too emotional to see the situation clearly and take rational decisions. Whether or not his illness has changed him, in quoting as he did in cabinet Cicero’s maxim “the health of the people should be the supreme law” he has shown that Britain has a prime minister with the moral decency to set the preservation of life as his highest priority. And for that, he deserves high praise.

The Times