Therefore, those who win every battle are not really skillful - those who render others' armies helpless without fighting are the best of all. (Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War', tr. Thomas Cleary, p.69).
They may be the most skilful generals, but they are certainly not the most skilful bureaucrats.
In all the endless commentary on Covid 19 I have seen very little written about the cost of lockdowns in terms of physical and mental health - a certain amount on the problems facing the victims of domestic abuse, the odd other article, and all that only after the lockdown was introduced. As time goes on, though, and people chafe under these restrictions, that will surely change.
At this point, if the number of fatalities is very low - say, fewer than die from flue in a mildish flue season, in the UK 2,000 or so - then the government will be vulnerable to the charge of having over-reacted. On the other hand, if death toll is catastrophic - say over 200,000 - the government will face a barrage of (justified) criticism for failing to protect the public.
From the point of view of the government's political advantage, therefore, there seems to be a golden mean associated with any course of action: the more costly its actions to combat the epidemic the more damage caused by the epidemic it needs to able to point to in order to fend off know-it-all critics after the event.
Accordingly, the more successful the lockdown is at suppressing the virus, the more difficult it will be to maintain it for any length of time: the its cost will grow at a linear rate or worse, while the virus-caused fatalities by hypothesis would increase very slowly. Thus the pressure to release the lockdown would probably quite quickly become overwhelming. It seems to me that the government's advisors recognise this - it would account for some otherwise strange comments about starting the lockdown 'too soon' - but their solution of stopping and restarting a lockdown, as if the country could be closed and reopened like an accordion, seems unrealistic.
Presumably, therefore, the UK will eventually be pushed into trying a test-and contain strategy like Thomas Pueyo's 'Hammer and Dance' ( click here ). Why, though, are the UK authorities - apparently - so reluctant to try this? Maybe time will tell.
