Coronavirus: Are older generation to be sacrificed to help build herd immunity in UK? – Susan Dalgety

Boris Johnson’s coronavirus measures are different to those in other countries – and there could be a sinister reason behind that, writes Susan Dalgety.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives a news conference about the coronavirus crisis in 10 Downing Street (Picture: TV Pool/PA Wire)

Not even the early research that shows women are less likely to die than men from coronavirus has cheered me up this week, such is my existential dread.

A study by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control shows that 2.8 per cent of infected men died, compared with 1.7 per cent of women.

According to a report on the BBC website, women’s immune systems respond differently to infection. “Women have intrinsically different immune responses to men... and there is good evidence that women produce better antibodies to vaccines against flu,” says Prof Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia.

Scant reassurance for an anxious hypochondriac, and someone who has reluctantly found herself in a high-risk group – over 60 and with an underlying condition. Chronic hypertension and a rare genetic blood disorder, if you must know.

I keep refreshing the WHO website that tells me my chances of dying from Covid-19 are much higher because of my age and medical record in the hope that there will be a sudden miracle cure for ageing, but of course, there isn’t. Getting old is a fact of life. As is dying.

Ageing is a strange phenomenon. Even as the lines deepen across your once smooth, plump skin, and your hair thins even faster than your rear end widens, you can convince yourself that you are still young... ish.

Until this week I was making plans for the next decade, seemingly without a care in the world.

After all, if Joe Biden can hope to be US President when he is 78 years old, then surely I can still travel the world when I am 73 – the same age as Donald J Trump is now.

I even dreamt that one day I would be able to slip into a size 12 dress, just as I did 30 years ago. But then I woke up.

The daily reality of ageing for most women, even in a country as rich as Scotland, can be harsh. As Scots get older, the social divide between rich and poor widens as health inequalities take hold.

Government statistics show that decades of living on poor wages or inadequate benefits lead to higher incidences of heart disease, type-2 diabetes and cancer, exactly the underlying conditions that Covid-19 feeds on.

Female pensioners are more likely to live in poverty than their male neighbours. Many women earn far less during their working years because they have to stay home to bring up the next generation. And now it appears old folk – men as well as women – are to be sacrificed to save the country – literally.

“It (coronavirus) is going to spread further and I must level with you,” warned the Prime Minister on Thursday in his most serious voice. “I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”

It seems to me that the Government’s plan is this. Coronavirus is very infectious, but most people (80 per cent) only get mild symptoms and recover quickly.

So instead of trying to stop it in its tracks by locking the country down for an indefinite period, which could destroy the economy for a decade, let nature take its course.

Infect as many people as possible, so that we all become immune, and if a few thousand grannies die in the process, well, their sacrifice will not have been in vain as the FTSE 100 starts to climb again. There may be method in his madness.

The thinking behind his “maverick” plan – which differs significantly to the measures adopted by Ireland, Denmark and elsewhere – is to let the virus do its worst, so that the country can recover quickly.

And if we all lock ourselves away as soon as we have a new cough or high temperature, the virus will spread slowly enough to allow the NHS to cope, but quickly enough to peak before next winter sets in.

Britain is to acquire herd immunity – the theory that once enough people have been exposed to a disease, it will stop dead in its tracks.

The fact that up to six million older and vulnerable people are to be the frontline troops in Johnson’s war against Covid-19 is rather chilling.

As I was planning how I was going to spend 2020 – a few months in France, publishing my first book, planning my second – I had not anticipated that I, and most of my friends, were to be the unarmed artillery against a deadly virus.

I hope the woke generation is grateful that we grumpy old women are now all that stands between them and Armageddon.

To take my mind off the impending doom, I have been following the trial of former First Minister Alex Salmond on Twitter. I wish I had stuck to cat memes.

The testimony of his alleged victims is shocking.

Serious, professional women testify about alleged drunken assaults in the First Minister’s official residence.

One of the witnesses declared that “women were not allowed to work with him (Salmond) on their own, unaccompanied”.

And another witness claimed that senior civil servants knew about her claim of sexual assault seven years ago.

Mr Salmond denies all the allegations against him, and is, unless the jury finds otherwise, an innocent man facing the most terrible charges. But however the trial plays out over the coming weeks, there must surely be questions asked about the organisational culture of Scotland’s civil service.

And Johnson’s cunning plan to stop coronavirus by throwing millions of older people in its path has to be rigorously interrogated, and not just by Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, who has expressed surprise that Britain is not doing more to “slow the spread of people catching the virus”.

We live in unsettling times.