Dear Mr ******.
I must say at the outset, that I believe that the balance of risks are in favour of the lockdown announced by the Prime Minister. That is, if we don't do it, 85,000 dead from Covid-19 is probably a realistic outcome.
However, the question is not as open and shut as it is presented as, and I am troubled by this.
Non-covid excess deaths during lockdown and over the summer seem to have been something like 20,000+ and whilst this is less than 85,000+, it certainly isn't a negligible figure, and were the same factors to be at work over the dark days of winter the non-covid excess deaths might be higher still. And yet, it's hard to know what the true figure is for people who have died BECAUSE of the last lockdown and its aftermath, and if relevant data is being published, it certainly isn't being publicised very hard. Because the Prime Minister is so focused on making people accept the inevitable, the closest he's come to an admission that lockdowns kill people is to say that he regrets the anguish that will be caused. I would trust him more if he were honest enough to admit that the government is effectively killing some people to ensure that a larger number survive, because that is the calculation being made.
I think this crisis could have the effect of making the Conservative Party unelectable because of decisions and outcomes that none of the other parties could have done differently. There is no party in the world that hates the Conservatives more than the SNP does: they have done essentially the same things as the Conservatives throughout. But presentation is all, and at the moment the inevitable is being successfully presented as either a choice willingly made, or a random act by a Prime Minister in chaos. And, yes, Sir Keir Starmer is the person successfully presenting both of those two mutually-exclusive points of view. This is what Tony Blair would look like if his duplicity was somewhat less transparent.
However, the Prime Minister still exhibits a flaw that has been evident to me throughout his political career, and it is that any argument, objection or even objective fact that he hadn't considered or which doesn't help his case is "piffle" and it is swept aside with an impatient sweep of the hand and an off-the-cuff remark which not infrequently betrays a total unwillingness to grasp the point being made. Such as his assertion that there was no need to protect ancient woodlands because there was no such thing as ancient woodlands because there were no trees in England older than, I think his figure was 160 years. This was so wrong as to be demented, yet he never actually acknowledged this. I could go on, for hours, because this isn't something he does every now and then, but really quite frequently.
So while what he is asking of Parliament is probably the right thing, no course of action which condemns thousands to die can possibly be completely right and, therefore, none of his critics and opponents are completely wrong. If this side of the scales cannot even be acknowledged, then the obvious ill effects of lockdown will be compounded by even worse political divisions than we already see.
As for the mechanism by which lockdown kills people, I would suggest that as soon as lockdown is declared, people with pains in the chest or increasingly obvious symptoms of their diabetes being out of control, stop even trying to obtain medical help -and this continues even after lockdown has been lifted and will continue until the government and its scientific advisors issue a positive message that the health service is willing and able to offer treatment and that it is safe to accept this. Another mechanism is at work with suicides, and there have been hints but no explicit admission, that suicides account for a very significant part of the non-covid excess deaths. No-one in their right mind wants to be held in a mental health unit when the virus breaks lose there, and there is nothing like a daily dose of bad news and discouragement from "SAGE" via the BBC to crush whatever hopes a potential suicide is clinging to. I don't think that any member of SAGE has ever considered how their regular woeful pronouncements might sound to someone who's already struggling with life. They show no sign of grasping the psychological impact of what they say whatsoever. If the PM cannot sack anyone from SAGE, could he at least appoint a few senior mental health professionals to balance the buggers?
Meanwhile, there has been no admission by our government, the WHO or most other national governments around the world outside Scandinavia, that nutritional deficiencies (of vitamins or other trace elements whose blood levels are easily measured) play any role in how a patient copes with a major challenge to the system, be it Covid-19, 'flu, bacterial chest infections or a car-crash. And yet, you don't need to be a top scientific expert to realise that any person with a nutritional deficiency will cope less well with a wide range of challenges to their health. It is a matter of record that about 60% of the UK population are deficient in vitamin D (and zinc) during the winter. If there was no pandemic on, I'd probably have no difficulty making my case that we ought to do something about this! But since there is a pandemic on, filters are in place against any sort of "fake science" "conspiracy theories" and, it seems, long-established and widely accepted scientific facts, such as a majority of people outside the tropics being vitamin-D deficient whenever their hemisphere is in winter. This is an annual reality. If something were done about it, not only might the death-toll from Covid-19 be reduced, the death rate from all manner of other infections and even injuries might be reduced as well, long after Covid-19 becomes a distant memory.
In the last two or three hundred years, most of the advances in human health have actually been advances in hygiene and nutrition, not medicine as such. The pandemic does not stop this being true, nor will it cease to be true in the foreseeable future.
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