I was reading this in the paper this morning. Seemed to make sense to me (I'm not sure who Toby Young is as I'm not up on media types). If I get corona and am desperatly ill am I worth spending £500,000 on as opposed to someone with cancer whom they will only spend £15,000 to £30,000 on? However harsh I doubt it.
Article from the Telegraph:
This week I found myself
“trending” at number one on Twitter. For the uninitiated, that’s not a badge of honour. Twitter creates a new “star” every day and, paradoxically, no one wants to be that person. You’re not at the top of the pyramid, so much as the bottom of a pile-on involving tens of thousands of people.
My sin was to
write an online article in The Critic, a conservative magazine, expressing scepticism about the Government’s Covid-19 strategy. I queried whether it was worth spending £350 billion and destroying the economy to slow the rate of infection.
Is the case fatality rate really as high as Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College would have us believe? Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford University has speculated that it may end up being 0.05 per cent, lower than seasonal flu. And what if Professor Sunetra Gupta and her team at Oxford University are correct and up to 50 per cent of us have already been infected?
Even if we accept the Imperial estimate that 250,000 will die if we don’t keep everyone locked down for the next 18 months, aren’t we placing
too high a monetary value on extending the lives of people who, for the most part, are very elderly and will die soon due to underlying health conditions?
The average age of the patients who’ve died of coronavirus so far is 79.5 and average life expectancy in the UK is 81. I worked out that we’re valuing the lives of those 250,000 people at £500,000 each.
It was that last calculation that enraged the Twitchfork mob. Tens of thousands of people across the UK started denouncing me as a “Nazi” and a “eugenicist” or, if they were feeling charitable, a “Tory scumbag”. Apparently, anyone who dissents from the official Government line – that we should do “whatever it takes” to stop people becoming infected – deserves to be cancelled. Several people even called for me to be locked up.
In fact, NHS doctors place a monetary value on patients’ lives and use it to make clinical decisions every day. As a general rule, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence values one quality-adjusted life year (Qaly) at between £15,000 and £30,000, depending on health. Even if we assume that each of those 250,000 people will enjoy another eight years of perfect health, we’re still valuing their lives twice as highly as we would in normal times.
Evidently, lots of people find such reasoning deeply cynical during a time of national crisis, when our instinct is to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. But
the economic damage being done by the lockdown will also cost lives. According to Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University, if GDP falls by over 6.4 per cent over the next two years as a result of prolonged economic inactivity, more lives will be lost than saved thanks to rises in poverty, violent crime and suicide. We’re already beginning to see the first signs of this in Southern Italy, where civil unrest is breaking out because people cannot afford to buy food.
The conclusion I reached is that the Government should end the lockdown after Easter and return to a mitigation strategy, with self-quarantining limited to those most at risk. Let’s get the economy going again before tens of thousands of businesses go bust, consigning millions to the dole queue. Our high streets were in trouble before the outbreak of Covid-19, but if the lockdown is extended for 18 months they’ll never recover.
Not everyone will agree with this analysis and that’s fine. What I find harder to understand is the intolerance shown towards those who challenge the current direction of travel. Surely, at a time like this, when the Government is making decisions every day that will affect all our lives for years to come, we need
more scrutiny of those decisions, not less?
One of the most common criticisms made of me on Twitter is that I’m not a virologist or an epidemiologist so I should shut up. Instead, we should listen to the experts. But
scientific experts aren’t infallible and how we respond to this crisis is ultimately a political decision, which means it’s a proper matter for public debate. Now is not the time to stop holding our elected leaders to account.
Toby Young is the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union (freespeechunion.org)
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Short term thinking IMHO.
. Issue we have currently is also bills I'm due which are yet to be paid..... Not started chasing people yet as I already know the answer 