Will the benefits of Boris Johnson’s reopening outweigh the potential costs?

The prime minister is gambling with other people’s money. Even his opponents have to cross their fingers and hope he manages to avoid snake eyes, writes James Moore

Safe? The British public so far seems minded to take a more cautious approach than its government (Getty)

The UK economy’s resemblance to a pile of wreckage on a set of railway tracks explains why Boris Johnson is extending the reopening of England. The government is scared. Perhaps with good reason.

But here’s the problem: consider the impact of sending an express train into it the wreckage. Consider the unprecedented scale of the economic shock the UK is enduring and then imagine it getting worse.

This is the danger posed by the much-feared “second wave”.

The prime minister will have been buoyed by official figures showing the decline in the percentage of deaths involving Covid-19 continued through the 24th week of the year in all the English regions.

The Office for National Statistics, as is its wont, tweeted out some nice graphs to illustrate the point. The first tracked deaths in 2020 against the average and the minimum/maximum range over the past five years.

The spike when the pandemic was at its height was glaring, but the mortality rate is now approaching normality for the time of year. A second graph comparing deaths involving Covid-19 to those caused by influenza and pneumonia told a broadly similar story.

There were fewer than 1,000 confirmed new cases announced on Monday, which is the lowest daily figure since the lockdown started on 23 March. The number of people in hospital with the virus has fallen below 5,000.

But while the data looks encouraging, epidemiologists remain nervous – and with good reason.

Covid-19 isn’t the flu. It’s a lot nastier and it’s more infectious.

Pubs across the country are set to reopen on 4 July but will the customers return? (Getty) (Getty Images)

There have been fresh outbreaks in other countries where it was thought to be under control, and the number of cases globally continues to rise at an alarming rate.

The breathtaking incompetence the government has demonstrated over track and trace, which would greatly assist with keeping the virus at bay were it working effectively, doesn’t inspire much in the way of confidence.

The hard fact is that the coronavirus isn’t much interested in spin, sloganeering or political theatrics. It’s similarly uninterested in the growing economic challenges the government faces.

The public knows this. All of which begs a question: will people reward Johnson for the risk he’s taking on their behalf?

Pubs, cinemas, museums and galleries may be preparing to reopen. Will the customers follow?

“Non-essential” shops saw queues on the first day but footfall was still down sharply when the week as a whole was compared to the same in 2019.

Johnson may have declared them “safe” to visit. A substantial number of consumers decided they’d rather not be sorry on his account.

The British people are currently showing a degree more common sense than the British government, which is making the reopening a soft one.

Perversely, this may work in Johnson’s favour. The fact that only a limited number of people are comfortable with taking him at his word should mean that the extra safety measures the newly reopened venues are adopting will work better.

Social distancing, even reduced social distancing, is easier to accomplish in smaller groups than it is in larger ones.

The question that remains is whether benefits of this “soft reopening” before it’s arguably safe will outweigh the potentially ruinous costs of getting it wrong.

A positive answer relies on the government getting lucky. Not for the first time, Johnson, whose administration has overseen the world’s second-highest Covid-19 per capita death toll, is at the craps table, rolling the dice and playing with other people’s money.

Hoping he gets lucky is not a comfortable position for his opponents to be in. But if he hits snake eyes the negative impact is scarcely imaginable. So that’s where we all are.