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Sumption. Maybe unpopular opinion. But. He's not wrong that there are sometimes policy choices to be made where you allocate lives saved, and this is commonly and IMO rightly done by giving more weight to those with more life remaining, and weighting by 'quality' too.
This is done within the NHS already and elsewhere [eg in health and safety] to allocate a fixed health budget across competing ways of saving life; or to allocate investment in competing safety improvement measures.
BUT. Sumption is wrong to invoke it here. If lockdown and other covid policies are executed well, this should benefit everyone. The old get longer lives, the young make their way in an improved, virus free economy.
Both health [predominantly of old and or with other conditions] and wealth [of everyone, working and non working, bearing in mind non working rely on assets, claims to the future economy] improved by lockdowns.
Sumption also fails to see the repeated game way in which society works, or should work. Today's young are tomorrow's old. They will face their own health pandemic risks and expect and ought to get the same treatment.
Covid suppression policy, and the fiscal measures to support it represent the public sector stepping into provide a form of pandemic insurance that markets can't offer.
So, right about the moral calculus; wrong to think of it as a one-off transaction; wrong to think there is a trade-off, that the young are giving up something [employment in functioning economy] that would be there if the virus were left to let rip.
These are not difficult arguments to grasp, even if they involve small forays into economics and epidemiology; there has been a lot to read on about it in 2020. One must question therefore why clever people like Sumption continue to make these poor arguments.
Ways in which this calculus does intervene is in the way healthcare gets allocated as covid puts more and more pressure on resources.
Money is not the issue here, in this short term, because capacity cannot quickly be flexed for many conditions. So the q is how to allcoate across roughly fixed supply of different treatments, covid and non covid.
These other conditions also disproportionately affect older people too, of course, so the calcualtion is not 'young lives versus old' in big picture. But there are still case by case decisions to make where years of life added are a factor.
From an econ/utlitarian perspective you'd expect covid to bite off a huge chunk of this fixed care capacity as the calculation to equalize marginal life extended across different treatments adjusts to the new flow of patients.
Obvs there are other philosophical views about the right framework for policy, but I am not going to go there. This is at least how it operates now, and how a change in challenges should/would be manifest. I don't see any practical alternative IMO.
As a PS it's particularly odd that Sumption is still on the war path about this *as we crank out the vaccines and the time after which lockdown is clearly going to end draws near and becomes more certain*.
