COVID-19

The UK Government’s public information campaign starkly tells us what we are to do – stay at home – and why – to save lives, and to protect the NHS. It’s fairly clear what it is to save a life, although it is not easy to measure how many lives will have been saved. But what is it to protect the NHS?

Two weeks ago, I came down with a respiratory infection that produced a high fever and a persistent, dry cough. Following the current official guidance, I went into isolation and my family entered quarantine...

At some point in this terrible pandemic doctors will have to make some unbelievably difficult life and death decisions. It is the point at which the demand for the intensive life saving resources outstrips their supply. At that point doctors will have to decide who receives care and who does not. No one should have to make such decisions, and yet they will have to be made.

Legal and policy responses to COVID-19 rest on and express the balance of different basic values and principles. Earlier and current regulatory approaches bring into sharp relief how liberty must be understood and weighed against other values. This is for the sake of liberty itself, but crucially too for other compelling aspects of social justice.

A brief analysis of what the Government is doing now to contain COVID-19, the possible restrictive measures that they might take to prevent and control the spread, why these might be justified, and why it is important that the Government sets out publicly – and early - the case for implementing such restrictive approaches.

So what relevance has our report to the enormous challenges being posed to health systems and governments the world over by COVID-19? Unsurprisingly, quite a lot.