Toughest calls

We all face some very big decisions as we think about life after lockdown, perhaps as big or bigger than any we have ever faced. At a personal level, this experience will have changed things forever for some people, and at a business level, we have to think about how our industry and our market has changed and how we best respond to that. It’s hard to know how to even think about these things, but for us as leaders this is a challenge that must be met. People are depending on our ability to think clearly and make good decisions. 

In the midst of that, spare a thought for our country’s leaders. The government faces an awful decision: if they relax the restrictions, more people will probably die from COVID-19 than if they stayed at Level 4. On the other hand, if they don’t relax the restrictions, the recession will be deeper, wider and longer. That means more business failures, more job losses and longer for the economy to recover and businesses to begin re-hiring. In this context, it is certain that people will die from illnesses that are related to conditions of poverty – lack of warmth, poor nutrition, unsafe home environments. That’s a certainty, not a probability. 

Politicians have not had to face these life and death questions for many years – generations in fact.  The last experience of economic decline of this magnitude was not the GFC (bad though that was).  It was the restructuring of the 1980s which led to the disappearance of whole industries, prolonged recession, and persistently high unemployment. The long-term impact on people’s lives – those trying to enter the workforce, those forced to leave the workforce early, those taking substantial income reductions – played out for many years. 

The challenge for government is that the virus is a crisis which dominates our headspace. We watch the numbers and worry about our physical safety. But because of the intensely dramatic nature of the short term, it’s hard to consider the future costs of decisions taken now. Every day the lockdown is extended, more businesses go under and more jobs are lost. At some point, the lockdown in its current shape becomes unaffordable. The cost of eliminating the virus becomes too high, regardless of the additional deaths. 

There are those who will respond that you can’t put a cost on human life, and their voices will be heard because it’s a dramatic narrative that plays well on social and mainstream media. But I think you can: it’s the other lives that will be lost as a consequence of saving those people from COVID-19. Experts can estimate the probability of a range of mortality rates from the virus if restrictions are eased. What government also has to think about is the absolute certainty of higher mortality rates arising from increased poverty in a deeper, tougher recession. Currently that can’t be seen but it will be a bigger number and with a lot of collateral human suffering. 

As an old friend of mine used to say, all the action is at the margin: the additional lives saved by extending the lockdown versus the additional lives lost by deepening the recession. 

Not a decision I would want to make. May our leaders approach that decision with wisdom and courage.