Letter: Politicians facing difficult choices to safeguard future

The coronavirus . As a result, there are two divergent schools of thought on how we should tackle it.

One says that we must do everything we can to protect the NHS and save as many lives as possible. The other says that if we don’t do more to protect the economy and save jobs, when the pandemic is over, we will have little left to come back to and will suffer economic hardship for years.

The latter is the kind of approach that Donald Trump would take, and you can see why (especially in a presidential election year). He only understands money and power. If Covid-19 was allowed free reign in America it might lead to three million American deaths, and while this might temporarily overwhelm the health system it would represent less than 1 per cent of the population. The remaining 330 million might have acquired “herd immunity” by then and be able to enjoy a good economic life – thanking Trump for it by voting for him in November’s election.

I have used Donald Trump as an example here because he is extreme – but the same logic could be applied to the UK or any other country.

I am fully in favour of managing our response to the virus to save lives, but we should recognise that the future of the economy is important too and that there will almost certainly have to be trade-offs between what we would ideally want (a healthy nation and a thriving economy), and what we can actually achieve. I am glad that I am not one of the politicians who has to make those difficult choices.

Robert Monro, Whitchurch