Boris's Choice

 

The chart above compares Covid-19 fatalities of the most extremely locked down country in Europe (Britain) with the least (Sweden).

This chart among a mountain of similar evidence proves that the British lockdown's achieved absolutely nothing... absolutely nothing at vast cost.

In fact it's far worse than that.

As the Mail reported:

More than 100,000 people are likely to die from non-coronavirus causes because of the pandemic, according to an official government estimate.

By the end of next month the chaos in hospitals and care homes will have led to 46,000 avoidable deaths, Department of Health research has suggested.

Cancellations to routine operations may cause 18,000 excess deaths in the long-term, on top of hundreds more from cancer.

Officials calculated that over the next few years another 40,000 people may die due to the economic impact of lockdown, including rising unemployment and mental health issues.

And it's worse than that.

Most of those lockdown victims had decades of life ahead of them, whereas the average of Covid-19 victims has been reported as 82.4 years. So in terms of years of lives lost, the lockdowns may well have been responsible for ten or twenty times more years of life lost than the China flu.

And it's worse than that.

Boris Johnson's government knows all this.

And they have known it for a very long time. Whatever else Boris is, he's not an idiot. And he's surrounded by smart people (apart from certain obvious exceptions, eg, Matt Hancock).

So why? WHY?

In short, doing the right thing. That is: not killing 100,000 innocents, not destroying thousands of businesses and millions of jobs, not borrowing £300,000,000,000 that our grandchildren will still be paying, not ruining the education and mental health of our children, etc, etc, etc,...

Not doing all of that would have been destroyed the popularity of the government!

To see how this apparently surreal irony could possibly be true just imagine for a moment the British media's response if Boris had maintained his original aim of 'herd immunity'. If we had isolated as best we could the most vulnerable in society and allowed the rest of us to catch a disease, which actually has lower death rates for young people than catching the flu. If in other words Boris' government had done what his Swedish opposite number had the courage to do.

The British media's reaction would have been a cross between a feeding frenzy and a zombie apocalypse. And it would have continued at an ever greater volume of foam-flecked, hysterical sanctimony until the government caved. 

How much are Boris and his cronies willing to sacrifice for power?

Well, faced with the alternatives of doing the right thing and getting politically destroyed, or bankrupting Britain, and causing untold death and misery they chose the latter.

I'm betting that it wasn't even a difficult choice for them. If not, where are the resignations?

In short Britain got destroyed so that Boris could crow for a while over the ruins.