Coronavirus: Politicians have a choice to make as the cost of the COVID-19 crisis will be counted in both currency and lives
Falling into step with most other countries around the world, the UK moved pretty swiftly into lockdown. And now, as governments begin to emerge from those draconian social measures, a new consensus is emerging around how to live with COVID-19.
Politicians in Westminster are still refusing to have an open conversation with the public about how we move from strict lockdown to a gradual easing of restrictions, or whether this might begin from 7 May when the current three-week lockdown is up for review.But the health secretary did confirm on Thursday that mass testing and contract tracing, a strategy the government abandoned on 12 March when it decided to let the virus spread through society, is the strategy once more.
Put bluntly, will politicians accept a certain level of COVID-19 deaths in order to release social restrictions and stimulate the economy? "We are spending tens and tens of billions of pounds supporting the economy, supporting jobs, supporting people's incomes and the economy is shrinking very fast. We're going to end up at the end of this year with a deficit of £250bn perhaps, which is about £200bn more than we were expecting."And it's not just the economy that will suffer from a long lockdown; our health will too.
"We've seen this tension between economy and health. We have economists saying it's not such a big deal and health people saying we need to lock down, and this is the wrong debate we should be having, because actually the economy affects lives," argues Devi Sridhar, professor and chair of global public health at the Edinburgh University Medical School.
Across departments, officials and ministers are working up options. They are based on a rather grim reality - that restrictions in some form or another might have to be in place for a year or even more as the world awaits a vaccine.
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