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I understand that the 150,000 figure comes from the medical and modelling authority that is the editor of the Spectator. It is likely to have been an outcome of one particular instance of one model that has been run to provide evidence for policy decisions. I have no direct knowledge of the models nor the outcomes, but based on my experience of newspaper editors I would suggest that it was probably the largest figure that the model came up with, probably in an early run with limited model complexity and input data and that the average figures were way lower. Unfortunately, balanced commentary and lower figures don’t sell newspapers.
The difficult line that governments must tread, though, is to balance the effects of action (which your cartoonist is trying to denigrate) with those of inaction. The correct comparison in this should be the number of deaths that may have been an indirect result of the lockdown versus the number of lives estimated to have been saved by that same lockdown.
The newspapers have suggested that the increase in deaths will be largely through suicide and domestic violence. The response to that should be a social response from all of us to reach out to our friends, colleagues and neighbours to try to prevent it, in the same way that our response to the lockdown should be to reduce our physical distancing to reduce the transmission rates. Our response should not be snarky cartoons and I’d expect better from this site.