Oh, that is so refreshing. A sighting of a real journalist in the wild. One who seems both logical and numerate. Too bad it is on the other side of the Atlantic.
The magnificent JHB on excoriating form: https://t.co/BtdHzQxmZQ
— Allison Pearson (@allisonpearson) March 31, 2021
As the reporter, Julia Hartley-Brewer, says, Britain is running a thousand deaths a week from Covid and it is on the decline. Exterminating Covid is both impossible and impossibly expensive. So what, from a policy and governance perspective, is a manageable level of deaths per week? 500? 250? 50?
It is a number. What is it. This is a standard six sigma issue. You want to bring error rates in production down to a targeted level. Every error has a cost in terms of wasted material, lost production time, possibly safety, etc.
You may not even need to be at the six sigma error rate of 99.99966% error free. The reason that you might not want or need to set the goal at six sigma is that there is a cost to achieving that increasing level of excellence and the closer you come to six sigma, the incrementally the greater the cost.
It is not a 1,000 deaths a week and it is not 0 deaths a week - what is it?
You are left to wonder, does Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick not know? Does he know but not want to acknowledge what number it is? Or, worst of all, is there no number because it hasn't even been considered.
On the one hand, you have got to imagine it cannot be the third option. But you also can't help but have the sneaking suspicion that the real answer is in fact the third option.
Julia Hartley-Brewer is clear in her questioning and the relevance of the question and she is unrelenting in her persistence. That is real journalism and I haven't seen it in a long time here in the US. I miss it.
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