For months now, I have been attempting to keep the focus of the Government and of the readers of this column, upon what was the stated Aim of our Coronavirus policy. (I have never doubted the wisdom of that aim, although I have always questioned the government’s lockdown policy as a means of achieving it)
We’ve all seen and heard it so often, and can call it to mind instantly: our united purpose is to save lives by protecting the NHS.
The logic is simple: if the NHS is overwhelmed by too many hospital admissions then not only will it be unable to provide care to those with suffering with Covid-19 – resulting in many more of their deaths, but equally it will be unable to treat people with many other serious and life-threatening conditions, so they will die in greater numbers too.
So, we aim to save lives by limiting the number of hospital admissions.
The aim is not just to save lives themselves, but to do so by protecting the NHS.
This is an important distinction.
Were the objective just to save lives, then we would only achieve it by a policy characterised as ‘zero Covid’.
This is the very ‘mission creep’ against which I have been warning. Right on cue this week Jeremy Hunt, Chairman of the Commons Health Select Committee, has argued forcefully that the aim should, instead of being expressed in terms of hospital admissions, rather it should be a specific reduced target of daily infections.
By failing to maintain the original aim, we lose the proper sense of urgency about achieving it, as if we had the luxury of delay until some other desirable objectives were achieved in addition.
Of course it would indeed be wonderful, were it possible, if we extended our objective to complete ‘zero Covid’ so nobody had to die of it again, or as far along that path as can be practically achieved.
However fanciful this may sound, there is nevertheless a growing lobby in support of it. Daily it is expressed in cautionary statements about the need to maintain restrictions on our lives and not to lift them too quickly.
The danger is that we are losing proper and realistic appreciation of the cost in terms of the long term damage to livelihoods, education, and a terrible toll on mental health. In short, we’ve lost all sense of the cost/ benefit analysis of current lockdown measures, and the sense that we urgently need to lift them as soon as possible, before they inflict even more lasting harm.
That moment of ‘possibility’ was defined by a level of hospital admissions with which the NHS could cope. Substituting some other new objective appears to be defined only by the length of a piece of string, keeping us in devastating elements of lockdown almost indefinitely.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
