As part of his very unapologetic use of
the word ‘sorry’ earlier this week, after the UK hit a ‘world-beating’ death
toll in the pandemic, Boris Johnson said, “We did everything we could have
done and we will carry on doing everything we can”. There are plenty of people
who have helpfully provided lists of all the things which could have been done
differently, and there is absolutely no doubt that, under more competent leadership,
the UK’s death toll due to the pandemic could have been considerably lower than
it is.
That doesn’t make Johnson’s statement
untrue, though – merely incomplete. There are two meanings to the words ‘can’
and ‘could’ in this context: one is about that which is possible and the other
relates to the capability of the doer. Note that he didn’t claim that they did
everything that could have been done, merely everything that they could have
done. Superficially, the two things sound similar, but the meaning is
completely different. If we add the implicit words: “… within the limits of
our ability, imagination, and ideology” to his statement, we get a much
clearer statement of the problem. It is not that there were other things which
could have been done, but that the current government was utterly incapable of
doing them. And the worst of it is that those three constraints – lack of
ability, lack of imagination, and ideology – aren’t going away anytime soon.
Posts
4 comments:
In todays politics it`s important to get your apology out there first before other people pressure you into making it.
As for ‘world- beating death toll’. well, it`s depending on how you view the figures, normally the NHS at the beginning of September sets the clock back to zero, but to enhance the propaganda message HMG has added two winter seasons to make it more dramatic- nice one.
I was not quite sure what The Boy Johnson was apologising for, I hope and trust he was not saying that the NHS put these people to death, as the staff were grappling with their first pandemic and the contingency plans, they had trained for went out of the window on the first day. Sure, the staff could have done some things better, but this is the ‘fog of war’ and that is also true for those setting the policy, what appear to be facts in the morning are not facts when the sun comes up the next day as events are moving apace – we have all been there.
HMG and the NHS can not keep people alive forever, as mortality has a 100% success rate and while each individual case is sad, when a bad winter comes along it is devastating as it inevitably takes those who survived in the previous less lethal years.
Spirit,
"As for ‘world- beating death toll’. well, it`s depending on how you view the figures, normally the NHS at the beginning of September sets the clock back to zero, but to enhance the propaganda message HMG has added two winter seasons to make it more dramatic- nice one." No, not so - you're misreading the figures. The measure under which the UK is world beating is one which simply divides the total number of Covid deaths by the total population, giving a ratio of 'deaths/100.000' over the whole period of the pandemic to date. Nothing to do with seasonality, nothing to do with setting any clocks back to zero, just a very simple mathematical operation on two known quantities. You can't get them off the hook on that one. If you really want to get them off the hook, the best arguments to use would be 1) that not all countries count deaths in the same way (which is true), 2) that the pandemic isn't over yet - there's still time for someone else to claim the title (which is also true), or 3) that the demographics of the UK's population (in terms of proportion of older people) is somehow unique (which is a much less certain claim). However, even deploying all of those arguments only gets you from 'the absolute world-beating death toll' to 'one of the very highest death tolls', so it's probably not worth the effort involved in mounting the defence.
"I was not quite sure what The Boy Johnson was apologising for" He wasn't apologising 'for' anything done by anyone, it was, as the post noted, a "very unapologetic use of the word ‘sorry’". He seemed to be saying that he was sorry 'that' so many people had died, as though it was something completely out of the control of himself and his government.
"HMG and the NHS can not keep people alive forever, as mortality has a 100% success rate and while each individual case is sad, when a bad winter comes along it is devastating as it inevitably takes those who survived in the previous less lethal years." True, of course. And in future years, it is likely that the 'excess deaths' figures will be negative, because many of those who 'should' be dying are already dead. All those who die with Covid would, eventually, die of something else anyway. But if you follow that principal, why treat anyone who's sick if they're going to die sometime anyway? The point is that 100,000 people have died prematurely, and that that figure is higher than it could have been if the government had acted differently.
That's 'principle', not 'principal', of course.
As I said it depends how you read the data.
In your original post you stated that the deaths were a ‘world-beating death toll’, but you gave no qualification on how you got to that conclusion. Your reply addressed that issue and your points (1) to (3) have some validity.
On the prospect of fewer deaths in the coming years, I hope this is true (I wish to declare an interest here), but it may not be the case as the baby boomers are now entering their early seventies and they are a large increase over the next decade and half from the previous norms.
I agree your spell-checker is better than mine.
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