Read on Twitter
The Sunak moving goalposts story...
1. There was only briefly a goal of simply 'protecting the NHS', and otherwise letting the virus do its work. The March 23 2020 lockdown brought an end to that.
1. There was only briefly a goal of simply 'protecting the NHS', and otherwise letting the virus do its work. The March 23 2020 lockdown brought an end to that.
2. That was the idea that you should only curtail case numbers to the extent that it avoided swamping care capacity, and inducing higher mortality from covid and other conditions.
3. So the goalposts did move. The moving was the the responsibility of the only body able to move them - the government.
4. But they haven't moved since. In that the govenrment has, although it has always acted late, never seen through the strategy of letting the virus do its thing. It always eventually buckled and went, belatedly, for suppression.
5. Or have they?
One clear alternative is '0 covid', a goal articulated by many medical experts and others. It is hard to reconcile what we have done as aimed at that. Unless you add in a lot of incompetence and power struggling to account for the failure to get near.
One clear alternative is '0 covid', a goal articulated by many medical experts and others. It is hard to reconcile what we have done as aimed at that. Unless you add in a lot of incompetence and power struggling to account for the failure to get near.
Away from that, the goals get defined in terms of a tolerence for a flow of deaths during the period preceding the time when the vaccine rollout achieves suppression on its own. It's possible that that flow/stock of deaths number has moved around.
We don't know, of course, because the government, athough its actions can only be made coherent by assuming they have a killing target, won't tell us how many people they want to kill at any point in time.
The Telegraph story isn't pitched like that. It is contemplating a recent moving of the goalposts from 'protect the NHS' to something stronger like 'kill the minimum number of people'. But, as I already wrote, this seems to me to be false.
It would be perfectly reasonable to move the killing target around, because new information is arriving all the time about the costs of avoiding death, in the form of vaccine rollout capacity, efficacy, take up, lockdown compliance, virus mutation and more.
The ultimate goal of maximizing welfare, because of news about the costs of avoiding death, or what is feasible, can translate into a varying target for how many the government decides it should kill.
