Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
I'd be grateful if you could provide any coherent economic analysis that supports your claim. Even the great bastion of capitalism - the USA - is throwing $2trn at Covid relief. So there has to be an evidence base for it, unlike your simplistic Tories good / Labour bad union flag waving opinion pieces
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Doubtful he will.
It's important to note that I don't think there are any right answers here. If you lock down and contact trace, you run the risk of company failures and economic problems, and also have to massively invade people's privacy.
If you don't lock down, you run the risk of people dying (which may also create economic problems, if enough people die).
The countries that appear to have dealt with this the best are those that locked down early, and had efficient testing and tracing procedures. If you lock down early, you may still get business failures, but they will be minimised.
The efficient test and trace requires that people give up some privacy. South Korea's test and trace system relies on the government getting access to the population's financial records (they get a list of where anyone who has had a positive COVID test has used any credit or debit cards they have), people's phone location data. I can't see our government ever doing this, because while I don't know how much the South Koreans trust their government, our government has already shown it has links to people who would mine that kind of data for profit, so people don't trust them.
By locking down late, the lockdown is going to last longer and be more widespread, so will affect many more businesses for longer. Those businesses will also usually pay taxes, so there is a reduced income for the government. Locking down late also means there are many thousands more people to treat. While most people are not affected much by COVID, an increased number of COVID sufferers means increased treatment costs, and an increase in benefits.