Lessons brutally learned

Your piece on the UK’s failures in managing the pandemic, with the exceptions of the Treasury’s financial support operation and the vaccination programme, was excellent (“The unofficial UK inquiry,” March). Few in government come out of this story well. In particular, as you note, there was a failure to understand what the Chinese, New Zealanders, South Koreans, Taiwanese and Vietnamese understood-namely, that there is no trade-off between suppressing the illness and the health of the economy

The evidence on this is quite clear: other things being equal, countries that suppressed the disease were also more economically successful. As I pointed out in the Financial Times, the explanation for this lack of a trade-off is also reasonably evident. People will not go back to their normal lives in the midst of a raging pandemic, especially when there is also a high death rate. The idea that the economy could ride this out while we sought “herd immunity” was ridiculous.

After this is over, we need to learn further lessons to ensure such a disaster is not repeated. But the big lesson when dealing with such a highly infectious disease is already clear, in my view: suppress it quickly, by controlling both the borders and the domestic spread. This is the way to return quickly to a relatively normal life. If one fails to achieve this, all options become horrible.

Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times

Striking the balance

The essay that you published on Covid-19 has a number of odd features. First, the comparison between Covid deaths and those in the Battle of the Somme is in extremely bad taste. If you do not understand the difference between the deaths of men in the first flush of youth and those of average age over 80, you should not be writing about such a subject. Second, the authors do not mention the failure during the first few months to protect care homes-by far the most scandalous occurrence of the epidemic.

But the real question is how far there is a trade-off between shutting down the economy and society on the one hand and defeating the virus on the other. Of course there is such a trade-off. The decline in output in the first half of 2020 was the most severe in living memory. If there had been no trade-off, we would have maintained the most severe lockdown right from the outset until everybody was vaccinated. But that would have been even more disastrous.