I hope we haven't overreacted to coronavirus and wrecked my grandson's future

Fea0094741 © Eddie Mulholland Central London between 13.00 and 14.00 today. 
Fea0094741 © Eddie Mulholland Central London between 13.00 and 14.00 today.

I have written a letter to our first grandchild, aged just four months, whom the state has decreed I cannot cuddle or even take for a walk in his pram. It tells him about his family history in case I’m not around to do so myself once he is old enough to be interested.

I had been intending to do this before the coronavirus hit, but it has taken on a new urgency since I might be among those who succumb, though I am not in the risk categories so far as I am aware. But who knows?

The simple truth is that the chances I might die before he is 18 grow higher by the year, pandemic or not. We are all mortal and yet are unprepared to concede the fact in a way previous generations did, surrounded as they were by reminders of their vulnerability.

A former colleague just a few years older than me died from cancer recently. How many people unable to get to see their GP or reluctant to go to hospital in the current climate will nurse symptoms of something far worse than coronavirus and die as a consequence?

Public policy makers embrace a pernicious doctrine called the precautionary principle. This holds that all risk must be removed from our lives by regulation and that failure to do so is just about the worst thing any government can do.

In this instance it has been activated to stop our health service being overwhelmed by a spike in premature deaths. “Be safe” is now the mantra of our times and yet we are never safe.

Even if we are not necessarily jeopardising the future prosperity of my grandson and his generation, we are certainly risking the short-term well-being of millions of businesses and their employees.

Our approach feeds on an inability to understand the data on which governments base decisions. The death toll from coronavirus is more than 400 and is going to shoot up in the next few weeks, causing alarm and panic. There will be many bereavements and mourning families.

But if I told you that 11,000 people died in the UK last week, would that make you more frightened? In any normal year 600,000 of us die. Many of those who will be taken by coronavirus would have been in these annual mortality figures perhaps after contracting the flu or pneumonia.

Yes, it is true that some will be taken earlier than might otherwise have been the case, before what we like to call their time. But who is to say what our time is? The one certainty we have is that our life on this earth is finite. The only unknown is when and how it ends.

Amid a national economic shutdown and restrictions on personal liberty the likes of which we have never seen, it must be asked if we have embarked on the greatest series of policy blunders in recent history. Donald Trump turned to his favoured means of communication to tweet in bold capitals WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. Because it’s Trump, he was derided for his idiocy but wouldn’t most people agree with that proposition? What sensible government would think otherwise?

Indeed, is this really the national emergency that Boris Johnson said warrants the authoritarian powers taken by the Government?

After all, we keep being assured by the boffins that for the vast majority of people this will be a mild illness, though it depends what you mean by mild, since if it is like flu it will make you feel pretty wretched. But most people who get it will recover. It is essential they are tested and can return to work as quickly as possible. Moreover, one estimate that 300,000 people may currently have or have had the virus in the UK puts the mortality rate into a different context. It is almost certainly a lot lower than we fear even if the overall number will appear high.

What we should have done weeks ago is to shield older, vulnerable people from those for whom the virus is less deadly. For a fraction of the vast sums committed to shutting down great chunks of the economy, we should have had much more mass testing, following up and isolating cases, while diverting productive capacity into the provision of more respirators and protective equipment for medical workers on the front-line.

This is what happened in South Korea, a country with a population not much smaller than the UK where an even greater outbreak was managed without shutting everything down.

We are told this is now happening here and the Government should be commended for its efforts. The pressure on ministers and officials is tremendous and they currently have strong popular support, though for how long will that last if wages don’t come through for people turfed out of work and provisions start running out?

Mr Johnson has given the country hope by suggesting the controls on movement will be reviewed in three weeks’ time. People now see this as the deadline yet it isn’t. Look to Wuhan, which has been locked down since January and is only just returning to a semblance of normality some two months later amid signs that the virus is spreading once again now that people are moving about.

The exit strategy from this nightmare cannot be zero new cases because that is not going to happen. We have to get people who will be affected mildly back to work and soon, provided they do not interact with the most vulnerable. Once the NHS has the intensive care capacity to deal with all new serious cases this will become less of an issue.

But if this goes on for long, the economic and social damage will have dire consequences for future spending on health, welfare, care and all the other public services that extend life now but won’t be able to in the future.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, the great flu pandemic of 1919 barely registered. Even the war seemed like ancient history by the time England won the World Cup in 1966 playing a country reduced to rubble just 20 years before. We recovered from these calamities and we will from this.

So, when my grandson turns 18, how will he look back on this time? Will it be remembered as the great coronavirus pandemic that wiped out swathes of humanity or a relatively minor contagion to which we grotesquely overreacted?