Andy. Your decision sounds sensible to me. It's your decision and I'm assuming as the oldest you're probably carrying the highest risk but also sensible with social distancing, hand washing, mask wearing, etc? (Apologies if I've made any wrong assumptions.) I think the mistake that's made is to consider Covid deaths as a linear function. If Covid deaths are x% of the overall cases it's likely until there effective vaccination that x will be reduced by better hospital treatments. However, I'm not aware of treatments that reduce the number of people with Covid from admission to hospital. Given Covid is highly infections and cases rise at an exponential rate (I'll use that term as the government does although strictly speaking in a mathematical sense I'd associate it with the exponent function, e) then hospital admissions could easily become uncontrollable. Once hospital resources are overwhelmed then deaths from other cases - accidents, flu, cancers, suicides, etc - will rise because of the an inability to treat them. So I can see it is nessary to reduce Covid cases but that may need a short term restructuring of the economy to support it so people can isolate or shut businesses, etc without being plunged into poverty or bankrupted, and that may mean taxing those with significantly above average wealth. Alternatively, one might argue, for example, that the one and only advantage of Brexit. is the UK could unilaterally tax the outflow of money to foreign organizations or individuals above a certain amount, or implement an on-line shopping tax? (Just initial suggestions …)
Michael Ixer ● 1976d