[throwawaylolx]

> Is it rational to choose economy over lives?

That's a false dichotomy: GDP is correlated with life expectancy, so you can't really choose one without the other. It's a question of which method saves more lives in the long-term, and UK appears have made their choice. Note that they most likely have much better understanding of the resources and capacity of NHS than U.S. scientists have.

[eloff]

I think they're clueless and are about to take down the NHS in self imposed DDOS. Death rates will go from 1% to in the neighborhood of 5% when people can't get medical care.

The number of ICU beds and respirators in the UK is public knowledge. It's also enough for less than 1% of the tsunami of cases I expect to swamp the NHS over the next sixty days.

[throwaway26644]

Conspiracy theory : maybe the government wants to have nhs to collapse as a way to turn the public against it, then when the crisis is over nobody will object to its privatization? In a post-Brexit world with Trump in the whitehouse it would not be so irrealistic as a theory but without some hard facts it remains a theory...