Diminishing Returns

                                      Diminishing Returns

Influenza is deadly. Before this year it routinely killed around 20,000 people each winter in the UK – sometimes far more. Influenza can develop, like Covid, into pneumonia, hospital admission, and oxygen up your nose. All too often, it means intensive care, ventilators, and, tragically, death. As recently as the year 2000, more than 56,000 people died from influenza or pneumonia in England alone.

Now, surely, no one would classify thousands of deaths from influenza as any less awful than thousands of deaths from Covid. It, therefore, follows that if we are prepared to lockdown to protect the vulnerable from one virus that kills, we must do so to protect them from the other. Every winter. Isn’t that just logical and humane?

This is from some satirical suggestion playing on the idea that only 100% survival is acceptable in any circumstance. No effort is too much, no sacrifice too great.

These are the people who deny the concept of scarcity. And they avoided the direct confrontation of that illogic by locking down the economy and creating a scarcity of jobs, earnings, and commerce.