This is how America and Britain are maximising coronavirus deaths

If you search on the web for the term ‘coronavirus bloodbath’ (which I did after I noticed the term occurring repeatedly in the press), you’ll notice that the headlines are not about the mass deaths of vulnerable people that are inevitable on the sort of bungling business-as-usual trajectory adopted by the likes of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The headlines are about stocks. Shares. Wall Street. The economy. Oil. Growth. Business. Banks. Finance.

Sections of the media, incumbent political elites, Wall Street and City of London investors are obsessed with the ‘bloodbath’ that is taking down the economy.

But this is not fundamentally an economic crisis. It’s a public health crisis. While global economic growth in its current form is structurally beyond salvage — the lives of human beings at risk from the spread of the novel coronavirus are not.

This piece sets out in stark terms what is at stake. I’ve used the available data and trends to extrapolate a series of ‘business-as-usual’ projections which convey the scale of what could happen without urgent ‘delay’ and ‘mitigation’ efforts being implemented right now. These are not forecasts, but thought-experiments — derived however from reasonably plausible worst-case assumptions — to scope the scale of the risk.

Read the full article here.