Anyway the idea of comparing deaths from coronavirus to deaths from car crashes is NOT #PrettyDecentLevel logic. I'm certain that no one knows the real number of deaths from coronavirus. The way the deaths are attributed to, and in some cases not attributed to, the actual causes is one reason. Different standards and in some cases different agendas would make this statistic questionable. Statistics in general should always be questioned to the degree that we use them to guide our actions but this is a particularly unreliable instance given the vast numbers of people who die each day and the vast number of people reporting the data.
"Car crashes" on the other hand are fairly straightforward, though that number won't be completely accurate either. But to form a better model of the true scope of deaths caused by coronavirus it wuold be best to compare this number to related statistics, those having to do with illness.
You can't be inoculated against car crashes and you can't catch a car crash by being near someone who has had one, generally.
The point is about acceptable risk.
Since the 1950s the UK has defined itself through ideas of liberty which came after Eleanor Roosevelt’s declaration of human rights and freedoms. In their name, people have been asked to sacrifice traditions, job security, personal wealth and in some cases their very lives.
A year ago, the same state that imposed these Modern logics raised the stakes by withdrawing the very liberties it had insisted people should die for (throughout The Cold War); in the name of a virus which would not and could not harm the overwhelming majority of people. The principal of democracy was undermined right then.
In the process of the lockdown, billions of pounds were gifted to multinational companies that just a few years ago were spitting on the idea of subsidies in principle: the British PM underscored that there was ‘no such thing as a money tree’ and he appealed to ‘British values’ in the process. And yet today, for the very wealthiest, the money tree apparently flourishes.
And now, it turns out that those values from 1948, regarding privacy, degrading treatment, freedom to move within national borders, peaceful assembly, and so on, are being fundamentally chipped away at—in the same moment people are being forced to ‘temporarily’ lock themselves away (from this virus that most need not fear).
With the above in mind, I’d say that the social and fiscal cost of the Covid response has been strangely and suspiciously disproportionate to the risk.
The car crash analogy might be useful in a wider and intellectually necessary discussion about what is and isn’t acceptable risk, so I welcome it. Any meaningful critique of the Covid response would seem to hinge on this assessment.
That said, I concede it might ultimately be a bit pointless to have any discussions about acceptable risks now—because the most damaging effects of the Covid policies seem all but irreversible.