Seanm
pfm Member
With different decisions made by the government then there would have been fewer excess deaths. Johnson made his choices and the result is that over the past 6 months we have the highest number of Covid deaths out of all the major European countries. There never has been a right answer, as noone could know what it is, but Johnson has continually provided the wrong decisions.
To be fair to iSage, they have discussed the privileged / disadvantaged divide w.r.t. Covid outcomes and said that things needed to be done to improve the outcomes for the disadvantaged through payments to be off work for sickness / isolation etc. I have not seen anyone (iSage or on PFM) say that these demands were infantile or absurd and I very much support them as things that needed to be done. But Johnson knew better and so they did not happen, i.e. we should be railing at the government not at iSage or people on PFM (unless they really think that Boris is making the right decisions).
With different decisions there would have been fewer excess deaths so far. It isn't dismissiveness to acknowledge modelling that shows more excess deaths in winter and spring as a result of opening up later, owing to seasonal effects, behavioural effects, waning immunity etc. I've always been agnostic about when to open up - how would I know? - but this was never an unreasonable or unsupported argument, and it doesn't look any more unreasonable now, given what's happening in Europe. I’m less and less persuaded by comparisons with other countries but the fact is that as we head into a difficult winter U.K. cases are declining while those in Europe are climbing, and given the UK's other weaknesses how much worse might it be here now, relative to say Germany, had we taken their path?
As for Johnson and his decisions, f*** him, there's no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I suspect that since the January lockdown decision-making has been largely out of his hands. Since then policy has not been obviously batshit or evil and pretending that it has been has distracted from more grounded and rational criticisms.
iSage might *acknowledge* inequalities and longer-term measures but they are never the focus of their campaign (and as far as I'm aware they've never acknowledged inequalities with regards to the costs and benefits of lockdown). Gav routinely calls my focus on work, sick pay and health/social care funding "infantile leftism" and I'm assuming iSage have made a similar assessment, because the focus has all been on short term, media-friendly measures. It's well worth railing at iSage because they have absolutely destroyed public debate around covid and effectively shielded the government at every turn. They continue to flood the zone with shit, and their prescriptions are reliably *worse* than the government's actual approach!