> It's a trade off but it's one that must be made

At the latest by May 2020, we knew that Covid risk was extremely stratified by age and underlying health conditions.

To be very clear: this does not mean the virus was harmless to everyone else, but treating the population as if risk were evenly distributed was bad analysis, and policy built on that assumption was deeply flawed.

What I would have wanted was a more honest debate about how to protect the old, the frail, and those with major risk factors while also minimising the social, educational, economic, and indirect medical harms caused by restrictions. Yes, that is hard! Policy is supposed to deal with hard problems, not pretend that trade-offs disappear because they are uncomfortable.

Instead, much of the public discussion collapsed into a useless binary: "lock down harder and longer" versus "let it rip". With hindsight, both look far too crude for the actual problem we faced.