ong adolescents in six weeks than in the whole of 2018 and 2019.
Fourth, it means that children whose parents have poor accommodation or precarious jobs are suffering serious distress and disabling psychological problems, when they are at no risk at all, to protect older people who are approaching the end of their lives anyway. The average age of death with Covid-19 is 82.4 years.
The moral is not that we should restrict just the old and vulnerable, which would indeed be impractical. The moral is that coercion is a blunt instrument which we should not be using, except possibly against those known to be infectious. It is simply too crude, too arbitrary, too destructive and too unjust.
The alternative is to give people balanced advice rather than commands. It is to allow them to make their own judgments in the light of their own situation and the situation of those around them: their age, their state of health, where they live, whether they have already had the disease and the sort of occasions on which they mix with others. People have a natural instinct for self-preservation. They are not idiots.
This is not a perfect solution, but there are no perfect solutions. Some people will make bad judgments. There may well be more people in hospital and more deaths. But that has to be set against the crushing of the human spirit and the catastrophic social and economic destruction caused by the government’s counter-measures. Ministers must learn to think about more than one issue at a time. Public health is not the only thing that matters. Public welfare matters more.
And the NHS? The evidence that it is threatened is thin. But there is a point of principle too. The NHS has been underfunded for years. It has one of the lowest intensive care capacities in Europe. It is regularly overwhelmed by respiratory cases in a bad winter, even without Covid-19. Yet it has never previously been suggested that because the state provides us with a service, it is morally entitled to deploy mass coercion to stop us needing it.
Lord Sumption previously, in March, April, May, September, November. Phew.
I'm not sure how much I agree with him any longer, but I'm glad someone's making the argument.
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