But would there...if the demographics were different?
We've mentioned Sweden......but tell me, is there another country in Europe that hasn't imposed a lockdown of some sort? Serious question as I don't know the answer.
Are you saying that every European Leader is/has been wrong in what they've done?
Virtually all countries imposed a lockdown in March. Quite a lot of them managed to lock down their care homes and then throw in a Covid bomb like we did. Whilst that was stupid, even in March, it was understandable when faced with limited knowledge and a hysterical press across Europe. Far fewer countries have locked down in the same way this winter, and the countries which have done "best" are largely the ones with a less-developed health service where we don't have to protect the doctors from hard decisions, and where nobody was bullied into creating a "world beating" testing system to pointlessly scare the hell out of the population.
Where we are now is that over half of the vulnerable population will have had the disease by the time the vaccines are in them, and literally all we are left protecting is the NHS. If we had left lockdown earlier in May and let the disease trundle on through the summer we'd be better off now, but we had to lockdown all the way into the foolish elimination fantasy. And we complain about the impossibility of finding new intensive care nurses whilst ignoring that intensive care is a hail Mary effort which makes minimal difference to the stats. We could have been working on a proper outpatient care system and keeping the disease out of hospitals altogether - things like getting steroids, oxygen clips and care advice out into the community, and potentially even pushing out HPAP into the wider community.
In terms of lockdown I can see the logic at this point of having a 3 week heavy lockdown now, because we've pig-headedly failed to prepare in any useful way, and instead caved into the indecent, arbitrary and useless ideas of a rather loud clique of clueless scientists and their cheerleaders in the press and tediously woke "left". The trouble is that even with the schools closing, which is essential to achieving anything, it's not going to have the level of success that's already being pinned on it, and it will be extended for at least 3 times as long as it's useful, until we lose all respect for government, science and the NHS.
We're setting ourselves up for a situation in the next generation where not only have we lost our economy, but we've also lost our respect for science and the power of communal action. I suspect that suits Boris rather well, but it's not where I want to be
www.newstatesman.com
