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Comment by leonixyz | Hacker News Reader

UK will survive, UK's economy will survive, they are consciously sacrificing many of their elders and weaker people - who are in most part a mere cost for the society - in favour of young and productive individuals. They are rationally addressing the consequencies of Brexit by doing so, taking an advantage over EU, who is likely to fall into recession. UK traded their moral for their economy.

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But aren't their elder people highly likely to be conservative voters, and also voting in large percentages. If those people do not vote in the next elections, won't the tories lose by a large margin?

Source: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/1... (And anything else I could find by googling gives similar stats)

The government may not be moral, but I don't know if any government makes plans for losing election in a landslide. Is there something I am missing here?

The next national election is in 5 years time...

Electors have extremely short-time memory and are in most part deeply ignorant. Moreover, at the time the next UK elections will come, there will be enough "fresh" new elder people to fool. BTW they can still blame China, Italy, for the disease. At that time, people will believe them. Look at what Trump did with the US. If the mayority in 320 million believed Trump then there is no way the mayority in 66 million could not believe Johnson.

And overwhelmingly voted for Brexit

The conservatives have just come out of the largest win in modern UK parliament history. They also posses an uncanny ability to be able to not see beyond the next year. They won't be concerned with the next election yet.

A conservative would probably answer that any conservative is happy to give his life for god, queen and country. And the Tories might say that winning an election is less important than the future of Britain.

I certainly hope "how can we avoid our voters dying and kill of those of the other party" isn't a factor in the decisions.

Well, then they're idiots. Plenty of people under 50 will end up in intensive care, roughly half of them survive, the remainder will have a good chance of lung issues for the rest of their lives.

I agree with what you say, but I also believe they did their pretty accurate calculations, and the net result is still going to be positive for them.

Is it rational to choose economy over lives?

At the very least it's morally repugnant. The majority of the politicians are in vulnerable demographics, so at least they'll pay the price like everyone else.

It's actually a pretty common thing for big corporations: this decision was publicly taken by a government, so it couldn't end up unnoticed so easily, but this lack of morality is the standard way of doing. Take for example when big companies decide about the lives of third world countries within their board of directors, in private.

> Is it rational to choose economy over lives?

That's a false dichotomy: GDP is correlated with life expectancy, so you can't really choose one without the other. It's a question of which method saves more lives in the long-term, and UK appears have made their choice. Note that they most likely have much better understanding of the resources and capacity of NHS than U.S. scientists have.

I think they're clueless and are about to take down the NHS in self imposed DDOS. Death rates will go from 1% to in the neighborhood of 5% when people can't get medical care.

The number of ICU beds and respirators in the UK is public knowledge. It's also enough for less than 1% of the tsunami of cases I expect to swamp the NHS over the next sixty days.

Conspiracy theory : maybe the government wants to have nhs to collapse as a way to turn the public against it, then when the crisis is over nobody will object to its privatization? In a post-Brexit world with Trump in the whitehouse it would not be so irrealistic as a theory but without some hard facts it remains a theory...

i'm quite sure there are folks in the high risk group that are insulted by your writing and people deploying this policy either put their parents in bunkers or don't have them anymore. this is the biggest gamble i've ever seen in my life.

Insulted by my writing? they should be insulted by their government. It's been Boris Johnson that said "prepare to loose loved ones before their time", not me.

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