[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by Chris

The Vallance quote is however lacking context.

It was made on best evidence at the time, but it was made at a specific and quite early stage of the crisis and was not qualified in any way as far as I can see. Did he offer 20,000 as a pinpoint for 'good' beyond which all is 'bad', or is it at the lower, mid or upper range of a scale of 'good'? How far beyond it is 'meh'? At what point do we hit 'truly awful'?

And ultimately, are we more interested in whether it's 20,000 extremely sick people who would have died this year anyway but now have Covid-19 on their death certificate too, or are we interested in an 'excess death' figure that tries to get closer to the actual impact on the size and health of the population?

I'm not trying to obfuscate here; simply pointing out that regardless of who it was who stood up and said '20,000' its value in isolation is strictly limited. And also that cold, dispassionate statistics, collated many months from now, are the only things that can actually give us a good idea how good or bad the government's response was.

Far from obfuscation, your reply is one of the most lucid in this thread - well worth repeating in the Coronavirus thread.