Lockdown Bulletin No. 3

Well here we all still are. Not much wiser about how to get things back to normal - apart from the charmless libertarian Toby Young in the new online magazine The Critic, rather wetly echoed in Australia by Adam Creighton in the Australian. They seem certain that shutdown measures are too extreme. The claim is that there will be just as many deaths caused by unemployment as might be by COVID19 and therefore straight after Easter we should all just go back to the way things were before.

Yes, the suggestion is that in 10 days time, just as - in the United Kingdom at least, I fear - hospitals will be entering exceptionally dark times, everyone should just forget about the chance of getting ill and dying, get up as if nothing is happening and hop on the tube and go back to work. You'll probably be fine, is the argument - well most of you, although it's impossible to say which ones won't be. Toby Young ended his article with the claim that he was actually suffering from the coronavirus infection while writing and was happy to become collateral damage, provided the economy could be put back on track, which I think he thought was a marvellous flourish but of course actually entirely undermined his argument since, if he has actually contracted the illness, he is arguing from a perspective utterly unlike that of the person who has not yet been attacked. That is, he knows that he is either a) going to die, in which case, from his point of view removing all restrictions won't matter or b) going to survive, in which case he will have immunity and will be fine if all restrictions are removed

I'm astonished by the number of otherwise sane people who argue that these proposals need consideration. To me, the suggestion that government should stand idly by while, in very short order large numbers die from a previously unknown disease is ludicrous. Few people have much faith in the political system anyway but, were politicians to shrug and adopt a laissez faire approach to this epidemic, on the grounds that the economy is paramount, what little trust that remains would evaporate. Patience is needed. Within a couple of months I suspect something will be sorted out - my imagination conjures up a tedious and unremitting rigmarole of testing, which will lead to certificates for those who have immunity and return to normal life, limited mixing for those without (complete with yet more admonitions about handwashing) and isolation for those who turn out to be carrying the virus, plus tracing of all those with whom they've been in contact (the tests involved must not be made in China; I'm hoping their manufacture, administration and analysis will provide plenty of jobs for those made unemployed by the current lockdown, they will all pay taxes and everything will be just fine on the finance front [Pollyanna is my middle name, although I do recognise that the people involved in the bureaucracy attached to this system will almost certainly be more obstructive and maddening than I can imagine.])

It's all too hard, it's costing a lot of money and, look, sure some people die, but, guess what, we all die some time, that is what the Toby-Young-and-cohort proposition boils down to. I imagine given half a chance they would argue that the asbestos industry really ought to have kept going as it's such a useful substance and not that many people suffer agonising death as a result of it. Creighton does drag in the tobacco industry, arguing that the Australian government countenances 12,000 deaths per year from smoking. The things you can do with statistics - leaving aside all the other arguments wrapped up in that claim, they don't all die at once, bringing down the hospital system with them, as has happened in Italy and Spain with the influx of people suffering from the extreme version of this new disease.

But I must admit that in Britain the government has done a pretty good job of squandering public faith all by itself, thanks to its breathtakingly incompetent scientific advisers, with their babble about "modelling" and "behavioural science" and apparent lack of any commonsense.. Watching University Challenge the other evening, I saw the look on the face of a spectacled member of the Durham University team when faced with a tricky question, and I thought, yes, I think that was probably, for rather too long a time, the reaction of Sir Patrick Vallance; Professor Whitty; the maddening Dr Jenny Harries - who insisted one day that mass gatherings were safe as houses and, without a hint of an apology, insisted the next time she emerged that none of us should ever see each other again; and Dr Graham Medley, the one who was wishing for "a nice big epidemic" when confronted with the imminent question of what to do about this new virus:

I kept wondering as I saw the group of government science advisors wheeled out on a nightly basis, how so many highly qualified, supposedly clever people could have failed so spectacularly to see that something pretty dreadful was hurtling toward the nation? How could they have not learned anything from the methods being used in Singapore or Taiwan or even South Korea to contain this new, highly infectious threat?

Then I remembered talking to a friend of my mother's, a farmer, who has recently got to know his new neighbour, a smallholder who works as a civil servant in Canberra and knows nothing about being on the land. My mother's friend was late to meet us because he'd been helping out his neighbour who had got himself in a muddle with his livestock. My mother asked her friend what the neighbour was like. "He's clever", he told her, "he's got about five degrees, so he's very clever." My mother's friend paused, "He's so clever he's stupid, I think", he eventually said.

Five degrees, terribly clever - so clever, they're stupid; yes, there's a lot of that about.