Choices

Subject: Choices

How do we find a balance between saving the lives of 20.000, 200.000, 500.000 who might possibly die from Covid 19 and the millions thrown under the bus of economic dysfunction. We hold saving  life as the highest pinnacle of societal achievement, we banish the thought of condemning to death the most heinous criminal, and we rack our combined conscience, as a society at the rights and wrongs of what is called mercy killing where death is the choice of someone in pain and distress. At the same time we skim over the actuality  of deaths of millions of foetus/babies in the practice of abortion or bombs launched from drones, many thousands of miles away from the hand which pulls the trigger ever so efficiently obliterating life on the other side of the planet.
It's a truly mixed up world where morality is stretched this way and that and only the call of expediency given as a reason.
If the people dying on the ventilators are, in the majority old with probably only a few difficult years left to live is one side of the equation whilst, on the other is the paralysis caused by the lock down which will cause many more deaths from malnutrition, exposure and even deaths from violence  brought about by the effects of a crippled economy, if the maths is done it becomes a no brainier that the health of the economy comes first.
The horse has bolted, getting a handle on the individual's death and prioritising that. The moment when we could have done the things we needed to do, given the warnings pre the pandemic, that we needed to plan for such an event was ignored,

Indeed we went in the opposite direction with George Osborne's austerity measures, cutting back on nursing staff and under funding the NHS as a whole.
Listening to the current batch of politicians reciting the claim that everything is in hand when clearly it's not, that plans are in place to get the protective gear to the front line staff going into the hospitals each day is reality, only in their own minds.
The platitudes from them all Boris, (who may now be rethinking what he said a few weeks ago) Mat Hancock the Health Minister, Micheal Gove, Dominic Raab and the last to mount the lectern, Priti Patel of the Home Office all singing from the same hymn sheet each promising, promising, promising that we have a plan.
What a mess when we can't turn our industry on to making safety garments and face masks other than the odd spasmodic twitch from sections of industry to swing their manufacturing capacity behind these things but still sadly there appears to be no political instruction to do so. Industry was complaining only last week that having heard the wild expectations from the Minister they still hadn't received the official go ahead.
We see those much lauded virus testing stations set up to test front line NHS staff but still underused because they won't test someone who hasn't received an email instructing the testing staff to go ahead and test that person. It's an Alice in Wonderland moment if it weren't so tragic.
During the last world war shipping was being sunk faster than could be replaced and the nation faced the distinct possibility that we would be starved into submission. The Americans put together and executed a plan to build what were called Liberty Ships.  Each ship took a 4 days to build from start to finish, sections were manufactured and brought together from all over the United States and welded into  a recognisable ship.
They mass produced ships in 1941 but its clearly  beyond us to make a face mask, instead we have to go cap in hand to China to pay the going rate, which, like the dying, is increasing exponentially.
When I think of those calls from Boris and his cronies to leave the EU and strike out on our own, doesn't this cold douche of reality make a mockery of the jingoistic optimism we heard, week in, week out from the same people, now proved to be so incompetent.