Should we seek to eliminate the risk of all physical harm?
We assess risk all the time; it is one of the things that makes us sentient beings. We weigh up risks against each other, we calculate the risk of doing against the risk of not doing. If we thought it was desirable to eliminate all risk, we would never get in a car, drink alcohol or play sport. We could not live in cities because of the pollution but we could not live in the countryside because of the pesticides that are sprayed on the fields. So how would we live if we sought to eliminate the risk of all physical harm? We would stay within four walls most likely (well ventilated), we would take a certain amount of steps a day (in circles) and we would eat only organic, plant-based food. But it is easy to see the cost of removing all risk of physical harm. We would be bored out of our minds, out of our four walls. We would become depressed; our depression would manifest as lethargy, we would have no reason to get out of bed in the morning. Far from thriving, we would not live long, healthy lives. We would not be living at all.
At the beginning of this year we started to hear news of a virus of the Corona ('Flu') genus spreading through China. By the beginning of April we were in national lockdown and I was in A & E with my four year old daughter. She had the temperature and cough that three other family members, including myself, had suffered before her but in coughing so much, she had burst a blood vessel in her throat. If you have never witnessed the amount of blood generated by a burst blood vessel, you would probably be as horrified as I was when she started bringing up huge clots into my useless, waiting hands. However, the doctor in A & E was not overly concerned. Believe it or not, this is a reasonably common occurrence when somebody is coughing a lot. The doctor was in no doubt, "It's COVID," she asserted; although at that time, inexplicably, our country was not testing symptomatic people, so we cannot know for sure if the five members of our family of seven who experienced symptoms actually had the virus. What we do know is that we are all well, even with our hair-raising trip to A & E in April, we have never been prescribed drugs or been admitted to hospital because of our suspected COVID symptoms. And this is the reality of the risk posed by COVID for the vast majority of people. Just like seasonal flu, COVID poses a particular risk to the elderly and vulnerable. The average age of death from COVID is 82. Of course, we are also hearing about so-called Long COVID which is a particularly frightening prospect because we understand so little about it. Even so, the risk to the healthy remains small.
The lockdown in which we found ourselves through April, May and June was an attempt, as I saw it, to protect our health system from being overwhelmed by COVID cases. We have a health system funded by the tax-payer, free at point of need, and so, if it is overwhelmed by the virus, that means that cancer patients, maternity wards, A & E departments would all be potentially damaged by a struggling NHS. The first lockdown should have been about steeling the NHS; building new hospitals, recruiting more staff and acquiring more ventilators and PPE. Despite the catastrophic damage to the economy of the first lockdown, it seemed a reasonable trade-off.
However, we are now in December and fast-approaching Christmas and a brave new year. Most of the country endures Tier 3 restrictions. Our restaurants and hotels remain closed until further notice. Stratford-upon-Avon finds itself in Tier 3, despite having infection rates lower than parts of Cornwall which remains in Tier 1. Stratford is the fourth most damaged economy in the UK, which should come as no surprise, dependent as it is on the tourism, hospitality and catering industries. That is a lot of people, young and at no real risk from COVID themselves, out of work and therefore not contributing to the economy and thus, the NHS. A lot of the businesses for which they work, particularly small businesses, will not make it into the new year. Did anybody ask this generation of young workers which risk they prefer? The risk to their health and that of their elderly relatives, or the risk to their financial futures for many years to come. They are a generation already disadvantaged by high property prices because each and every government seeks to keep inflated our precarious property bubble, not wanting it to pop on their watch but never addressing the root of the problem. They are a generation that must pay £9,000 a year in tuition fees in order to gain a tertiary education but will then have to work for free or for below minimum wage on spurious internships simply in order to add something of value to their meagre CVs because the jobs aren't there. And now, we have given them a recession the likes of which we have not seen since we won the Second World War and had to rebuild our economy and country. Poverty is another risk we might consider; it kills the vulnerable as well.
Now that we have started our programme of vaccination, it seems imperative that we return to some kind of normal. But we are not. The scientists warn us that the effects of the vaccine are not fully understood. How immune will somebody be after one shot, after two? What if the virus mutates? The natural world is full of these as yet unknown outcomes but again, we can make some sound assumptions; we usually do. We assume that the sun will rise every day. We carry on as if it will because it would take far too much time and energy to prepare each evening for a different outcome. It would be counter-productive anyway. But it is indicative of the political environment of caution that we now inhabit, that the long-awaited vaccine is not propelling us back towards a fully functioning work-force or even education system. The wearing of masks in public places is no great infringement of liberty; some people, I predict, will continue the mask-wearing long after the need prevails. The elderly and vulnerable may need to shield for sometime to come and hand-washing is a good habit to have become fastidious about. But to cripple our economy in order to achieve the impossible and eliminate all risk from COVID, this is safeguarding with catastrophic economic risks.
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