The Economist (20200620) by calibre

Author:calibre
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: news, The Economist
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2020-06-18T19:47:00.953000+00:00

The best performing rich countries, such as South Korea, are those that managed to keep the pandemic under control. The worst hit economically, such as Spain and Italy, are those with much higher death rates. When public opinion will not tolerate elevated death rates, the trade-off between public health and the economy dissolves. A healthy population and a healthy economy go hand in hand.

That the British government has provided its people with neither is reflected in opinion polls (see chart 6). The prime minister himself remains fairly popular, but his ratings are in decline. He won sympathy when he succumbed to the disease, but has lost it in other ways. The revelations that he missed five consecutive meetings of the COBRA emergency committee when the virus was taking hold, and that Dominic Cummings, his chief adviser, broke the lockdown rules he helped design, fuelled suspicions that the government did not take the crisis sufficiently seriously.

The political consequences of this failure are likely to stay with Mr Johnson during his time in power (see article). The man who expected to be defined by his ability to “Get Brexit Done”, as his election slogan went, will be remembered for something else altogether. As one of his Conservative predecessors, Harold Macmillan, responded when asked what was most likely to blow a government off course: “Events, dear boy, events.”

Those events are far from over. Every day throws up a difficult new decision. It is unclear how to get schools to reopen or persuade parents to take their children back to the classroom. The government is under pressure to reduce the two-metre social-distancing rule, but more than 1,200 new infections a day are being identified in Britain, compared with a few hundred in Italy, France and Germany. Loosening social-distancing rules and reopening the economy under these circumstances is a risk.

Mr Johnson has a knack for getting away with things, and perhaps this gamble will come off. The previous ones he took with the nation’s health, however, did not. ■

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our coronavirus hub

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