A report in The Times today highlights a study by the Dept of Health, Office for National Statistics and the Government Actuary’s Department which concludes that overall recession caused by lockdowns will be more harmful than the virus.
While it states that there would have been 200k extra deaths in the three months to March, including 76k extra deaths from an overwhelmed National Health Service, it goes on to use ‘quality adjusted life years’ , calculating that a recession will lead to the loss of 1.3m years of quality life versus 1.1m years lost to Coronavirus deaths.
And living under lockdown itself results in an estimated 1.1m years worth of good quality life lost to inactivity, alcoholism, drug addiction and other factors.
It may on the face of it seem a little harsh to weigh the actual death of actual human beings against a number that appears somehow arbitrary, almost plucked from the air. But the whole point of a piece of work like this is to try to get a little closer to the truth about the trade-offs we are making trying to manage the spread of the disease via a method (lockdown) which is itself hugely damaging to mental and physical health, the economy and so on.
Mexico
I was speaking to a friend who’d just got back to London from Mexico the other day. He described returning to this ‘Sceptered Isle’ as being rather like The Wizard of Oz in reverse – going from the colour and ebullience of Tulum to the black-and-white gloom of the industrial hinterlands between Heathrow and South London with Covid restrictions in full force.
In reality, I wonder whether the 1.1m years ‘quality life’ figure is an underestimate? Certainly, it’s hard to calculate precisely what we have lost through this unprecedented mass global experiment of shutting down most of the civilised world and requiring that people stay in their homes for wearyingly long stretches of time.
Think of all those experiences, all that colour and joy that has been forfeited in the past year.
How can you possibly quantify that?
Perhaps, when historians look back on this in the future they will decide that, regrettable though the lockdowns were, it really was the best tool that governments had at the time to try to mitigate the effects of the disease.
Maybe they will consider them a huge overreaction, a cure worse than the ailment it was meant to sooth.
Living through this, though, we are not gifted with hindsight or the ability to see the wood for the trees. All we can see (in London, and many other parts of the world) are shuttered shops, boarded-up restaurants and streets empty but for a few derelicts: only the alcoholics and the crack heads are truly free in 2021.
Cosplay Totalitarianism
And regardless of your hot take on precisely why all of this is happening – that is, whether you believe that your government are simply doing what they believe to be the best thing, or if you think that the alien lizards at DAVOS planned all of this years ago to spring their heinous ‘great reset’ on us all (a conspiracy so secret that there’s even an extremely boring book about it by Charles Schwab) the end result is the same: we are experiencing a state that might best be termed cosplay totalitarianism.
Because right now you could be arrested for doing all manner of things that we previously took for granted, from hugging grandma, to opening your pizza parlour and inviting guests in, to going on holiday.
Not only that, but all vestiges of culture, and really all of those things that make life worth living outside of work, outdoor exercise, loved ones (if you’re lucky) and sleep have been banned.
And will remain banned.
For months.
The pubs are closed. The theatres and cinemas are closed. Bookshops and libraries are closed. Art galleries are closed. You can’t attend live sports events. Gyms are closed. Well, you can finish off the list for yourself.
Worst of all, we hear stories of heavy-handed policing, of people being fined for sitting on a park bench and drinking a coffee. And even more sinisterly, we are now encouraged to report our neighbours and even family members for minor infringements.
In other words, the life that we are forced to live right now is significantly worse than that lived by the majority in the world described in George Orwell’s 1984. Because, remember, it was only members of the party in that book who had the tellyscreens and were under constant surveillance. The ordinary people – the proles – could go to the pub, meet friends, have fun and do pretty much what we liked. All of which sounds like luxury to us now.
Sometimes when I walk out into the street and see long queues of people waiting to buy food at the supermarkets it crosses my mind that this – these conditions – must be pretty well equivalent to what people experienced under communism in the former soviet union, or some other totalitarian regime.
And whether you believe the ‘new normal’ is in fact the slow creep of a new (and intentional) authoritarianism, or you just think this is a bunch of people in government doing what they consider the right thing, doesn’t really matter. We are where we are – in a state little better than that experienced by a country under enemy occupation. And it’s not great.
I suspect that the collective PTSD suffered after this is over will take quite some time to heal.
