Let’s get back to work before Britain goes under because of this coronavirus lockdown
HARD facts mean hard choices. In the week before Easter, 16,387 people died of all causes in England and Wales.
This was 6,082 more than the five-year average. Half of those 6,082 deaths are blamed on coronavirus.
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We do not know how the other half died, although some will have missed life-saving healthcare because of the pandemic.
What we do know is that this hideous virus is killing the economy.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warns a three-month shutdown will slash growth by more than a third, push unemployment up by two million and raise borrowing by an eye-watering 500 per cent.
Lockdown has destroyed Britain’s “jobs miracle”, put paid to a fragile “Brexit bounce” and triggered what could be the worst depression in living memory.
“It is important people know there will be hardship ahead,” warned Chancellor Rishi Sunak, an under- statement if ever there was one.
On your one-hour daily exercise break, you can see the tragedy unfolding.
Once-thriving restaurants and bars, busy offices and shops and key construction sites are locked and bolted.
Behind every door is a personal and economic tragedy.
Despite a torrent of taxpayers’ cash unleashed by Mr Sunak, many will never reopen. Some are already bust. Life will never be quite the same again.
The Treasury is stumping up billions to pay furloughed full-time workers, help the self-employed and offer Universal Credit to the very large number who slip between the cracks.
We are piling shedloads on to our already massive national debt. For many firms and individuals this is a devastating blow from which they may never recover, financially or mentally.
Lives lost from delayed emergency care, alcoholism, drugs and domestic abuse have rocketed.
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Together with fatalities from other causes — mostly poverty and despair — they could dwarf the toll from the virus.
Some children’s life chances will be wrecked by a long break from school or, worse, from being cooped up with violent family members.
Those who keep their jobs may be forced into severe pay cuts. Costs will spill down through the generations.
Not everyone is suffering.
Public sector jobs and pensions are secure, for the time being.
Some with savings, decent homes and jobs they can do from home might actually be enjoying Easter with their families at their side.
Breadwinners forced to stay in instead of eating out or flying abroad will have spare cash in their pockets at the end of the month. And some will have grabbed Rishi Sunak’s offer of 80 per cent pay to put their feet up at the taxpayers’ expense.
But it all adds up to a crimson bottom line that our children and grandchildren will have to meet over decades to come. Some of it will be paid for in blood.
Without cash from tax revenues, how do we meet Sunak’s pledge to fund — “whatever it takes” — our wonderful NHS and its costly new life-saving treatments?
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Can we afford a generous cradle-to-grave welfare state, good schools or the promised infrastructure linking North and South with better roads and railways?
One day a vaccine will bring this miserable pandemic to an end. But what will remain — and at what cost?
Downing Street, without its most important figure at the helm, must find a way to save Britain from destitution without being blamed for “putting money before lives”.
It is a challenge only a loony Corbynite leftie would wish on their worst enemy.
But to govern is to choose.
And despite having just escaped his own near-death experience, it is impossible to see it happening without Boris Johnson’s say-so.
The PM knows there will be questions to answer once all this is over.
They are already coming thick and fast — on testing, NHS capacity and protective equipment for NHS staff.
These need to be settled fast — at literally any cost.
We will then need an inquiry into the failure of so-called “experts” to see this coming.
We will want a detailed explanation from the Public Health England quango which focused costly resources on obesity and diversity, rather than the pandemic they war-gamed four years ago.
Why, for instance, were they so slow to allow non-NHS specialists into the fast-accelerating battle against Covid-19?
The Sun Says
NO Briton alive has experienced the scale of economic devastation looming over us.
A three-month lockdown will hit us harder than the Great Depression. Worse than World War Two, the global financial crisis of 2008 or any recession.
A gargantuan rise in debt and unemployment. A terrifying collapse in tax revenues. A vast Government bailout to save businesses and jobs.
It should be a comfort that these same official forecasts also predict a rapid rebound, assuming the lockdown ends and the virus is largely conquered.
But even if that startling optimism — which we struggle to share — is borne out, immense and permanent damage will already have been done. Millions of jobs will have been destroyed, thriving firms bankrupted and a monstrous new debt pile amassed, taking years to pay off. The pain of the austerity era after 2009 will have been a mere taster.
It is good at least that Britain now knows this. We hope it sinks in. The public must consider it before it rails against any relaxing of the lockdown in case more Covid victims die.
No one wants more lives lost. But the debate is not lives versus money and jobs. Many will also die from the hardships of poverty, unemployment, tax rises and spending cuts if the economy is kept paralysed much longer.
The behavioural scientists advising the Government rightly fear that the public will doubt whether the lockdown’s success in protecting the NHS is still worth it if the recession it triggers kills thousands and destroys the health service’s funding anyway.
We are not there yet. We do not yet know if UK deaths have peaked, though hospital admissions are flattening and the NHS does now look likely to cope.
But the crunch point, where a date is set to slowly release Britain from house arrest, cannot wait much longer.
GREEN SHOOTS
Labour will blame the Tories, but all of these pandemic risks were pointed out as far back as 2005 when Labour were in power.
Boris, who became Prime Minister only nine months ago, was occupied with other matters until his December landslide.
There are some “green shoots”, to quote one of our medical experts.
The NHS now has spare capacity. There is no longer a risk of it being overwhelmed.
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This was one of the key reasons for the draconian crackdown — to avoid an unmanageable “spike” in crisis admissions.
That risk has diminished. It leaves headroom for a return to work and school.
The sooner that begins, the sooner we will see the “rapid bounce back” forecast by the OBR.
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