On our daily permitted exercise yesterday Mrs H and I debated whether the government was switching it's key parameter from the ability of the NHS to cope to minimising deaths. Nothing explicit has been said but with the NHS currently living within its expanded capacity (it seems the Nightingale hospitals have barely been used other than to test them out with small numbers) the key statistic ministers are saying they want to see responding is the number of deaths coming down.
The Sunday Times reports today that the inner quad of four senior cabinet minsters (Raab, Gove, Sunak and Hancock) may not agree on what to do next. Sunak, supported by several other cabinet ministers outside the quad, is concerned that most businesses have only one to three months of cash reserves and significant problems will result if the lockdown isn't eased soon. Gove backed him up in cabinet last week, saying he agreed with Sunak and had concluded that "we need to run this hot", but Hancock doesn't agree.
I had been reflecting that, if the NHS has significant capacity in reserve, restrictions could be eased as the government had said that was the single most important issue. On the other hand finessing the restrictions to try to stay comfortably but not excessively within that capacity won't be easy and it does mean accepting more deaths than continued lockdown. I sense ministers were relieved the daily death total dipped after approaching but never quite reaching 1000 and I wonder if that has become a psychological barrier they don't want to breach.
Dominic Cummings has returned to work and isn't one of the "let's get going again" hawks having read a lot about Spanish flu, when countries that came out of lockdown sooner not only lost more lives but also took bigger economic hits. Chris Whitty is in that camp. A cabinet source told the Sunday Times "The problem of running hot is that there is a delay of several weeks between taking action and seeing results. We want to avoid the situation where you relax the rules and then have to tighten them again". (Such relaxation and tightening was considered almost inevitable in the "hammer and dance" strategy I commented on previously, see post of 7 April).
It seems to me they are getting ahead of themselves here. We have the luxury of being behind a lot of other countries in the progress of the outbreak - a good couple of weeks behind Italy and Spain for a start. We can watch what happens as those countries (and France and USA too probably) start to ease restrictions. We can also look at countries like Sweden and Denmark which did not go as far with restrictions in the first place. Ministers had said now was not the time to decide on how to ease restrictions and they were right: it's a decision that doesn't need to be made yet.
Usually when I've met senior people from business, the civil service and politics I've been impressed at how sharp they are. They size up issues very quickly and see more angles while someone is introducing the subject than anyone involved in the preparatory work ever thought of. And they often instinctively balance risks and opportunities in coming to an almost instant conclusion about what they think is the best course of action. Which generally turns out to be sound - but not always. In business people often say they'd settle for being right 80% of the time, because what matters is moving forward quickly.
But quick decisions aren't always wise. Slow decisions might not be wise either: they may be informed by more information though that might just add more confusion. I get the feeling that if we wait for the scientists to give clear advice we might wait too long. I've seen some strategically catastrophic decisions taken at snail's pace.
The high flyers I've met who struck me as wise were also sharp, but not necessarily as sharp as a razor. Oh they could see all the angles pretty quickly too but sometimes they would sense that the issue wasn't as clear cut as others were making it out to be. They'd fairly rapidly decide the best course of action, even if they couldn't necessarily explain all of their logic. When in time it turned out to be a good decision, especially if it hadn't been the majority thinking, we'd say what a wise leader we had. (Or maybe lucky, as in give me lucky generals).
This is surely a time for wisdom - and luck, in terms of the decision makers' hunches. The wise thing right now is to watch what happens elsewhere.
The Sunday Times also reports that the phrase "exit strategy" has been banned in Whitehall after one epidemiologist pointed out that the only virus ever to be eradicated was smallpox. D'oh! I'm with the journalists on this one: they haven't been asking for an exit strategy from the virus, they've been asking how we move out of the lockdown, as everyone knows that the virus will still be around at some level at that point. Don't they?
If we can't have wise people in Whitehall can we at least have folk who understand English and logic?
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