For a brief moment, it has since emerged, survival of the fittest almost became British government policy. As cases of coronavirus spread exponentially through the population, experts were pointing out that this would inevitably continue unless drastic measures were taken to stop it. Their projections predicted a death toll of between a quarter and half a million people, mainly elderly and infirm, while 80 per cent of the rest would recover from a milder form of the illness. Thereafter, and with the most vulnerable no longer present, the population would benefit from herd immunity. Enough people would have had coronavirus antibodies in their system to ward off further mass outbreaks.
It was quickly realised in government circles that this would have been regarded, in Parliament and by the country, as unacceptable and immoral. It would mean leaving the National Health Service to collapse under an unbearable load. Though it was the approach least likely to cause deep damage to the economy, it would have meant sacrificing an older generation in the interests of the younger – the greatest good of the greatest number, with only pity for the rest.
So the government backed away from this appalling prospect. What it was faced with instead, for the sake of the common good, was the necessity for an unprecedented intervention in the workings of the economy, shutting large portions of it down, making the State in effect the employer of most of the population, and disrupting the lives of ordinary people to an almost inconceivable degree. But this is a crisis in which the inconceivable can become inevitable inside a week.
25 March 2020, The Tablet
A vital return to the common good
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