For more than six months we have danced to a relentless drumbeat of grim metrics covering the spread of Covid, its mortal and social consequences, its economic impacts. And we were a society that increasingly lived by
data even before the pathogen spread its blight.

“In God we trust. Everyone else must bring data” is the line usually attributed to the American statistician, William Deming. Yet as I reflect from my Orkney window overlooking Scapa Flow on our shared experience since lockdown began on 23 March, and contemplate what might befall us as the natural and political seasons begin to change, I am more and more struck by the importance of human attributes and activities that are beyond the reach of the numbers that go into the calculation of the gross domestic product.

The Treasury tells us that, thanks to Covid, we are facing an annual debt of £2 trillion, the equivalent of a whole year’s national output. I do not underestimate the task of filling that fiscal hole over the next five years or even longer – but I draw great consolation from the immeasurable moral economy, made up of countless acts of kindness, mutual help and sheer shining altruism.