Controversial point but

Nope
The government have definitely crashed the economy, but you only have to read here that there’s more they could have done and that some have fallen through the gaps.

they could have gone sooner at a greater cost

 

You, controversial .... never.

(I agree mind, and it is possible extend your point to other things)

 

No. We rightly spend millions on trying to defeat cancer (165,000 deaths a year) and other causes of death like heart disease (64,000 a year) etc but the 26,000 deaths from road accidents are just accepted as the price we pay for the privilege of driving.

 

Maybe the HMRC should reinvite all those company heads out to dinner to further discuss the massive tax write offs handed out willy nilly. Perhaps filmed and broadcast live so we can all see what's going on. BT alone were given a billion pound rebate over dinner. Funny what happens when the head of HMRC is often chosen from the same pool of business types that hide trillions offshore.

No wonder we can't have nice things.

 

Not sure it is correct to say that we just accept deaths from driving accidents as a price to pay for the privilege of driving. There have been so many advancements in technology on cars over the years to make driving as safe as possible that it would be time consuming to list them all. Many of them have subsequently been mandated as necessary requirements on new cars. The reason is that we strive to see the number come down as much as possible and never accept that they are inevitable or a price to pay.

The problem is though that, regardless of the safety features on a car, you can not eliminate bad driving. The word accident is always used to describe a crash but to me it implies that it was unavoidable and 99% of crashes are entirely avoidable, they are caused by bad driving.

 

Yes.

I used to work for Jaguar Cars and I know well how much car companies spend on making cars safer. A good example is pyrotechnics on the XK8, I kid you not, under the bonnet there are explosives which are linked to sensors on the bumper which push the bonnet upwards in the event of hitting a pedestrian so that there is more space under the bonnet before the unfortunate person hits the engine block, thereby "cushioning" the impact. Truly a case of shockingly bad design resulting in a massively technological work-round. I always wondered how they got that past the vehicle inspectorate.

However, it's more the attitude of the police with regard to enforcing road traffic laws and the massive ignorance of the motoring public with regard to the highway code. If governments really cared about road safety, there would be mandatory re-tests (not necessarily a full blown test) and proper enforcement of speed limits etc. Also the police would be given the resources to properly follow up reports of bad/dangerous driving instead of simply ignoring it if nobody actually got hurt.

 

I think the point is that if they'd done it sooner the initial spike would have been lower, suppressed a lot quicker and lockdown would have been shorter. I think there's a danger we're going to **** this on both fronts - underestimate it initially and lockdown too late causing avoidable deaths, and then be too cautious about reopening things due to fear of the PR backlash - causing a deeper recession and avoidable indirect deaths.

 

The deaths aren't a surprise though, it's a fairly consistent figure across years. They could be almost entirely eliminated - just set the speed limit at 20mph. Whether we like it or not a society does have to weigh up the value of human lives in economic terms.

 

I think the bigger danger is reopening too soon