The States responsibility

Subject: The States responsibility.

It's hard to know what is producing the worst effect, the spread of the virus with the infected totals inching upwards or the news of the panic on the financial markets at the consequences of industry and commerce shutting down and the effect that will have on our financial stability.
The virus we know kills people at an exponential rate but only it seems amongst certain segments of society. Perhaps, as in wartime, decisions are taken which accept the loss of life such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Dresden in the latter stages of the Second World War. The aim was to bring the contagion of war to a close by shocking the adversary and bringing them to the negotiating table, the death toll was assumed a price worth paying to limit more deaths.
In the UKs unique decision to seek 'herd immunity' in other words to let the virus spread until a majority of people have it when, it is assumed our bodies will gain an immunity through natural self immunity. It's a case of numbers. We no longer try to protect everybody, as is usually the moral case and willingly confirm through our actions that the death of the old and in-firmed is a price the Government is willing to pay, a  decision unprecedented  in peace time. Clothed in scientific assumption and statistical modelling it removes the individual from the equation and deals only with best economic practice.
They might be right, perhaps this virus is unstoppable and the economic toll of closing down so much of our society's economic activity is a price too high to pay.
One of the conundrums of modern medicine has been this trend to use new medical procedures to keep the sick alive when old and past their actuarial best. The willingness to distort what would, a decade or so ago have been the time to let a person, past a certain age go and die as part of the natural order of things has been supplanted by technology.

The cost in terms of resources both medical and economic in so far as the stress it produces on hospitals and the actuarial assumptions made regarding pensions, distorts both industries and results in ever increasing costs which have to be met by the tax payer. In a world ruled by the balance sheet perhaps the virus has given us a get out clause, an escape route from our moral indebtedness to the old who have become incapable of producing and have become lodged in the loss column. In an age where the single bread winner has been replaced by both adults in a family having to work and the children rapidly becoming an expensive social responsibility, with parenthood now coopted by the state in terms of the crèche reaching into the child's upbringing where preschool meals meet the criteria of the meal time and the school is evermore expected to take on the role the parent used to play.
In this Orwellian scheme of things is it any wonder that another section of society is presumed the States responsibility to do with as it wishes.