Covid-19: preventing deaths is not the top priority

I'm being good, I really am.  No unnecessary journeys or contact with others.  Choosing to exercise either very early or in the shed.  Washing my hands.  No panic buying.  Being one of the 700,000+ Good Samaritan volunteers.

And yet, and yet....something troubles me about all of this, and it's not just the police forces who seem to be delighting in their new powers (Derbyshire, Humberside - yes, I mean you, though I'm sure there are plenty of others), nor the people calling the police to report their neighbour going for a second daily jog, worrying though those things are.

It's more than that.  It's understanding that though we're being presented with the current measures and restrictions as a reaction to a public health crisis, that's only the first, and least important part of the story.  Those restrictions are essentially a political response to Covid-19, designed to maintain public order and the fabric of society.  I'm not saying that's wrong, merely that it shows that all deaths are not equal.  I'm also not saying it's a UK issue, nor even one of liberal democracies. It applies the world over, in all kinds of regimes.

Here's how I see it.  The latest modelling - which may or may not be accurate - is suggesting the UK may have 5,700 deaths as a result of the virus, two-thirds of whom are people likely to be in the last year of their life.  That feels a bit low to me based on current trends, so let's double it, and say there will be 12,000 deaths, a third of which will be people who otherwise wouldn't have died any time soon.  That's 4,000 new, avoidable deaths.  Let's say we didn't have the current restrictions in place, and as a result that rate was 10 times higher, at 40,000 deaths.

Shocking, right?  Hard to imagine.  Coffins everywhere. But as a number it's dwarfed by the number of officially recorded avoidable deaths in a typical year, as defined and recorded by the Office of National Statistics. The year for which the most recent numbers exist show that by the ONS's own definition, 31,000 women and 56,000 men died from what it calls "avoidable mortality" (treatable and infectious diseases, accidents, suicides, drug use etc.).  So in a 'normal' year, we have double the number of avoidable deaths that we'd suffer even in an extreme version of the Covid modelling.

For Covid, in addition to the restrictions on personal freedom, we're essentially crashing our economy for the foreseeable future, and creating debt that I think will take at least a century to pay off.  (Did you know we only paid the last of our WW2 debts off in 2006? [to the US]). For all other avoidable deaths, however, it's business-as-usual. 

What's the difference?  To use a horrible modern term, it's the 'optics'.  Most avoidable deaths are relatively unseen; we might hear about a death on the roads, or someone taking their own life, or someone else whose cancer was discovered too late, and think that while each one is a tragedy, it's no cause to fundamentally change what we do as a society. They're drip-fed doses of the reality of modern life.  But there's no moral difference between our reaction to Covid and what could be our reaction to the regular avoidable deaths.  Roads could be engineered and rules applied to massively reduce deaths on them.  The funding for mental health services could be expanded massively for the at-risk.  Everybody could go through very regular screening that would discover most cancers at an early, treatable stage.  But those things don't happen, by-and-large. Governments of all hues maintain a relatively balanced view of the political and economic drivers of policy.  Deaths still happen, but fewer than with no government intervention, and more than if every resource were focused on stopping them. But they happen evenly, in chronological and geographical terms, making them unremarkable other than to the poor souls affected and their families and friends.

Covid is unlikely to be like that however - there would be a massive spike in avoidable deaths, and we'd see pictures like the ones emerging from Italy and Spain, of rows and rows of coffins, of hospitals that couldn't cope with the numbers, and people dying from want of treatment.  And that would trigger in all likelihood political and societal upheaval; unrest, riots, other crime. So governments are taking action to manage that.  I'm not saying they're wrong or irrational to do it.

But what I am saying is that we need to recognise our own inconsistencies, our own lack of understanding of what goes on in the world normally, and how essentially fear of our reaction to extra deaths is driving government policy across the globe.  That policy may, as I say, be a rational reaction to address the risk of society fracturing, but let's recognise that it's our irrationality, our lack of awareness, and our inability to truly assess risk, that are driving the formulation and implementation of the policy right now.  So let's not ask whether governments are doing enough to address the threat from the virus, but whether we, in fact, are doing enough to spread the knowledge and rational thinking we're going to need in the future - because if something like Covid recurs in the next 20 years, we will be truly screwed from an economic point of view, and be sufficiently serious that it might generate the kind of societal breakdown the authorities are working so hard to avoid at the moment.

PC pc

I wanted to be a policeman when I was a little boy.  It seemed glamorous and worthy at the same time. Even as a student and then in the first years of work I looked into the possibility of joining up, but on each occasion my short-sightedness counted against me.  While I'm not particularly authoritarian, the existence of a large unarmed force, keeping the peace by popular consent rather than through power and coercion, has seemed something the UK should be legitimately proud of. I'm instinctively on the police's side.

In recent years that instinct has been challenged by a succession of events. I recognise that the list that follows probably represents a tiny fraction of overall policing activity, and that the vast majority of rank-and-file coppers are as embarrassed about it as their high-ups are pleased with it, but these have been the things that have come to represent the modern British police:

- being late to act (if at all) on grooming gangs
- taking the word of a fantasist (who later turned out to be a paedophile) at face value when he was incriminating innocent people
- allowing Extinction Rebellion to engage in acts of vandalism and civil disobediance
- a senior officer locking himself in his car and exiting the scene while one of his officers was dying from a stab wound (the Westminster attack)
- policing "hate speech" on the internet (where there clearly was no incitement to hatred or violence)
- actively participating in, rather than merely policing, Pride events.

In other words, in my eyes, they've had some bad PR. And the thing that links all the above (excepting perhaps the disgraceful Westminster episode) - the adoption and holding of a particular 'liberal' (though in reality it's nothing of the sort) set of political views.

Despite all the above, when I found out at Christmas that there was no age limit these days on who could apply to join the Special Constabulary (the part-time, unpaid police; but still 'proper' police, unlike PCSOs), I thought I'd give it a go.

That application culminated in a face-to-face interview last Friday at Cheshire Police's HQ.  The interview was conducted by 2 people; one female who was about 25 and was described as an "HR assistant", and 1 male in his early 30s who gave me his name but not his role.  The conduct of the interview was slightly odd in my view - each of the interviewers literally read from a script both at the start and end of the process, and the interview itself consisted of me being asked 5 pre-formulated questions.  Aside from the question of whether interviews as a technique actually are a valid prediction of how someone will perform in a role, and the rather odd atmosphere that prevailed because of the scripting, I'll share the 5 questions I was asked (the wording may be slightly different as I'm writing this from memory, but I'm not too far away):

Q1. Describe a difficult situation that you have faced, and how you went about addressing it.
Q2. Your sergeant wants you to find out the problems that your community faces. How would you go out about doing this?
Q3. Describe a problem where you had several options open to you - how did you assess each one and decide what to do?
Q4. You witness a senior colleague making an inappropriate response to a female colleague at work, which leaves her visibly upset. What do you do in that situation?
Q5. Thinking about a difficult challenge in your life - what did you do to be able to cope?

That was it. Bear in mind this was an application to be a policeman, my view would be that questions 1 and 3 are legitimate - they, if followed up properly, would give an insight into my thought processes, and Q5 may potentially say something about my resilience. But questions 2 and 4? Take Q4 - it may be of some relevance to, for example, my attitude to authority and whether I'm likely to turn a blind eye too readily, but this is one of the key things you want to ask me, really?

And that's the important thing - what these questions don't cover. Where are the questions that truly test my judgement in a policing situation?  That properly assess my motivation for wanting to join the force?  That ask how I'd make time to do this role alongside my current job?  That seek insight into my judgement and common sense? Or my negotiation and pacifying abilities?  En masse, they're a pathetic, politically-driven, standardised set of questions that in my view elicit virtually nothing about how a decent plod would do his or her job.

I suspected trouble was brewing after the end of my answer to question 2 - the one about "problems in the community".  I waffled on for a bit about community representatives and blah blah, and at the end of my answer I was - they were momentarily off-script, goodness me - prompted to name some specific people I should be engaging with. I hadn't a clue how to supplement what I'd already said, and pretty much said so.

It wasn't, therefore, a massive surprise to be turned down. Frankly, I was neither surprised nor disappointed. If those are the questions against which they decide whether to let me in the club, I don't want to be a member of their club, to disfigure a classic Groucho Marx-ism.  I can absolutely see the thread that links my interview questions to the appalling senior management police misjudgements over the last few years.  It's borne of a political view of the world (not necessarily party political) that has abandoned any sensible assessment of the amount of disutility particular crimes cause, and treats them accordingly, and instead attaches a political value to them - hence being offensive to transsexuals on the internet warrants more police time than investigating a burglary.  It's ironic that the principle of preventing crime by walking the beat now seems to apply more to offensive things in the virtual world rather than horrible ones in the real world.

Maybe it's best they turned me down. Maybe I'm too old, too old-fashioned, too socially-conservative, too intolerant. Perhaps their interview questions were, in that context, right on-the-money, and did the job they were supposed to.  In which case, good for them. But it makes me fearful for the future.  The people who manage to answer these questions properly are the people keeping us safe. I'm sure a sensible few will manage to game the system and get through, but it's worrying that the others will be unthinking, right-on, amoral idiots.