So, in March there was 'a plan' - lockdown, so as to reduce pressure on the NHS. To 'flatten the curve' so the peak hit post flu season.
I got that.
It made sense. It was clear and concise, and scientific. With graphs.
Now there is nothing clear, nothing concise, no graphs except rising infection rates. And the deal is not 'stay in for a month and we got this' because flu season is six months.
Everywhere I look businesses are folding. Schools are isolating. Colleges are prisons. The retail sector has been deemed zombie businesses, not worth saving. We'll all retrain to be butchers or bricklayers - jobs 'the economy' needs.
My friends who are models, actors, set designers, musicians, bar owners, restaurant folks, folks who run cafes or work in the theatre or hospitality or cinema. Turns out we had all made bad life choices, doing these stupid zombie jobs in our award winning businesses for decades.
Maybe, just maybe, the future will need hotels, and airlines, and cruise ships and Disneyworld. But today we are all just stupid idiots, who didn't get office jobs.
Perhaps we can retrain as Amazon delivery drivers?
As slowly but surely other businesses succumb, and those of particularly in the North - try and figure out the math, I feel like a guy who has been bit. And Boris Johnson and his government are eagerly trying to hand me a gun with just one bullet.
We all need to mitigate risk. But risk comes in all forms and different guises.
At the start of flu season? There's going to be massive rises - there are all over Europe, in countries that HAD a better strategy than us. A strategy that wasn't just 'British exceptionalism'.
But right now, without a plan there is just 'do lockdown for months without doing lockdown at all, with little or no support for the industries and areas most affected'.
Each individual part of the economy is part of a connected whole. And when you start gutting it, you get cascade failure. Catastrophic system collapse.
Feels good on paper. Feels you are 'doing something'. Protecting people. Protecting them so they can go out of business. Protecting them so their mental health can nosedive. Protecting them so they can lose their homes but send their children to school to still be a vector.
I guess we will see what happens - in Merseyside, in Newcastle - places friends of mine have extremely popular and well regarded businesses. Things they'd never do in London they'd do here.
Remember the Tories were the party that suggested 'managed decay' - basically cutting Liverpool off and letting it die.