You can pretty much rely on an MP to open his mouth and say something that he hasn’t really thought through.
Take Steve Baker for instance. He is deputy chair of the Covid Recovery Group, a group of Tory MPs set up to scrutinize the government’s response to the virus. He called the latest tier announcement “truly appalling” and said that he was “open to supporting measures” but only if it could be “clearly demonstrated that the government intervention will save more lives than it costs”.
So Mr Baker, how are you going to demonstrate this relationship between lives and costs and, if the cost is too great, who is going to decide who lives and dies?
There are a number of factors to take into consideration. It initially seems painfully obvious that saving a young person’s life in intensive care is cost effective because they will have many years of work to pay for that care. A retired person will be making no such contribution to the cost. However, that older person will already have contributed a lifetime of taxes and so, we should allow, they have already paid for the treatment. If that is the case, on financial grounds alone, everyone who needs a hospital bed should either get one or not get one, everyone or no one. Instead Mr Baker seems to be suggesting that we let the virus do the dirty work on the most vulnerable, on the elderly, they are just collateral damage. (Mr Baker is 50 in 2021.)
Next, if we assume that the Prime Minister’s stay in hospital was typical, then his treatment cost us three days in intensive care (£1932* a day) and three days on a ward (£413* a day) which makes a total of six days and a cost of £7,035.
As the average pub pays a third of its takings*** or £3800** a week to the exchequer in non-Covid times and, I assume, all their suppliers are making similar contributions, it seems plausible that, because we will not be paying furlough, a busy pub will just about finance one person to be hospitalized for a week. We just need to hope that, without lockdown and tiers, the hospitality industry will make enough money to pay for all the extra victims finding themselves in hospital. It’s easy to say we have 20,000 Nightingale beds, where are the doctors and nurses for them?
Finally, accepting it’s perfectly reasonable for Covid to be self-financing. Just one small hitch, 3,258 people have died in the last seven days.
Who is going to go around to people’s homes and tell them that their husband, wife, children, grandparents died because we couldn’t go without a pint for a few weeks? Job for the MPs I reckon.
*Professor Rachel Elliott, University of Manchester
** 39,000 pub with turnover of £23bn. Pre-covid 13,000 pubs have shut between 2001 and 2019. ONS
*** Morning Advertiser, publicans’ trade paper