Covid-19 and the expendables

 

Paul Embery is not an epidemiologist, virologist, or indeed a doctor of any description. According to his Twitter bio, his main claim to fame is being a columnist for UnHerd. Despite being a member of the National Union of Journalists, he appears to have missed the bit in his training where you're taught to properly analyse and responsibly report on statistics.

Unfortunately, his ridiculous tweet received a lot of traction, predictable support from the likes of Julia Hartley-Brewer, and, sure, it looks credible enough. After all, he has included a link to the NHS website. Why, he's just a humble journalist sharing Actual NHS Statistics to prove his coronavirus-minimising point. And given that we all love the NHS so much we used to applaud it every Thursday night, how could we possibly question his wisdom?

Quite easily, actually.

First, we have the ageist bigotry that says it's somehow OK for people over 60 to die of Covid-19, that once we all turn 60, our lives, our value to society, our purpose is diminished. Women over 40 already know they start to become invisible after a certain age. Now we are told that once we hit 60, we should consider ourselves lucky to have had such a good innings.  

From a purely cold economic standpoint, the NHS figures mean that an increasingly productive part of the economy is at risk and should be protected. According to the Department for Work and Pensions, between 1985 and 2015, women aged 60-64 represented the highest increase in employment rates of any demographic, rising from 17.7% participation in the workforce to 40.7%. In the same period, employment rates for men aged 65-69 increased from 12.8% to 25.8%. That's a lot of extra tax revenue and consumer spending from these demographics. As the government continues to raise the pension age, these figures should surprise nobody.

Then we have the sinister "pre-existing condition" part of Embery's out-of-context tweet. It's stunning how casually we can dismiss the coronavirus deaths of those with pre-existing conditions. This includes diabetes, asthma, heart conditions, immune system conditions, regardless of the person's age. Suddenly, we have a much larger group of people at risk from Covid-19. 

By and large, thanks mostly to modern medicine, plenty of pre-existing conditions can be managed so people can live healthy, productive, happy lives. You can't always see a pre-existing condition but if that person caught Covid-19, they could become seriously ill and possibly die way before their time. But Embery's thoughtless tweet devalues the lives and contributions of millions of people as he attempts to minimise how serious this global pandemic is.

And with a virus as easily transmissible as Covid-19, it's not just the deaths we need to focus on. There are plenty of blowhards who'll yell into the internet that there's "no need to panic about a disease with a [insert very low percentage here] death rate!". But that ignores not only the lost productivity from people who test positive, and their contacts, having to self-isolate - it also ignores the emerging data about the long-term effects even after a patient has recovered from the virus, including long covid, where people suffer ongoing health problems for weeks or months after the usual two weeks or so of illness. Even if you do survive Covid-19, that's not necessarily the end of the story - viruses can be nasty like that.

Of course, none of this has been helped by an incompetent government led by a self-serving, impatient, spoiled man-baby of a prime minister, a man more concerned with tomorrow's headlines rather than properly dealing with a major public health emergency. The UK lost the advantage of being an island in March with a late lockdown, no closing of international borders, and letting events such as Cheltenham go ahead.

Boris Johnson hates being the bearer of bad news, hence his pathetic WWII Blitz spirit cosplaying about it being all over by summer or Christmas or Easter or next summer. And don't forget his incoherent ramblings about the commonsense and pluck of the British people, even when this commonsense appears to be in short supply. But that suits Johnson too - it works for him for us to turn on each other for breaking lockdown rules or being "too careful", rather than to seriously hold him and his useless cabinet to account.

There is a desperation for things to "return to normal", which is perfectly understandable. We are all missing so many things from Before Times. But even after we have been sufficiently vaccinated and the virus sufficiently suppressed, there will be lasting changes. This means everything from irrevocably changed personal relationships to radical decisions made after taking stock over lockdown, through to a growing culture of flexible working, a collapse of the commercial property market, and a possible rethinking about how city centres can be repurposed to be more residential rather than merely places where we go to work before disappearing to the perimeters. 

We cannot and should not emerge from this awful time unchanged and none the wiser. But as long as nonsense, such as that ridiculous tweet from Embery, is shared, the stats unparsed without challenge or consideration, the emergence will be a long time coming.