HAMISH MCRAE: Three lessons from the coronavirus lockdown 

It is Easter – in any normal year, a time of renewal, of celebration and of hope for Christians and non-Christians alike.

While these are the strangest of weeks, there is at least some good news. We can begin to see the turning point of the pandemic in several countries and glimpse the ways in which the world economy can safely get moving again, armed with vital lessons learnt from this crisis.

Emerging from lockdown will be trial and error. There is no road map of the best way forward. But some countries, including Austria and Denmark, seem to be ahead of the UK and US in the cycle and we can learn from them.

A plan for the UK to return gradually to something close to normal has been developed by the economist Gerard Lyons and is outlined here.

The overriding point here is that we have to make this journey. The pandemic will end. So the better we manage to do it, the better the outcome for our nation’s health and wellbeing, as well as our economic and financial futures. The lessons we must heed as we take these next steps fall into three main categories.

First, we have learnt a lot about global co-operation, and much of that is truly encouraging. There has been criticism of national governments, of course.

China was, to put it mildly, slow to disclose to the rest of the world the scale of the disaster that had happened under its jurisdiction. European governments responded too slowly, and the US government has had a bumpy ride.

The World Health Organisation and the European Union have not come out well of this either. But at a practical level there has been massive co-operation. Scientists all over the world have been sharing their studies.

The medical profession has been trying to learn what treatments work best. Pharmaceutical companies have been racing to find a vaccine, competing and co-operating at the same time.

Artificial Intelligence, perhaps the most exciting new technology right now, is being deployed in hundreds of studies, from tracking people who have been infected and seeing who they may have contacted, to scouring databases for molecules that might help in the search for a vaccine.

The world’s scientific, medical and commercial communities are throwing everything they have at this disaster in a way that I don’t think has ever happened before. We will look back and be amazed.

Second, we are learning about the need for resilience at many levels. Governments that have got their finances straight have been much more able to pump money into their economies than ones that have huge debts.

Germany, which has been running a fiscal surplus, is able to give much more support than Italy, which has a national debt of 140 per cent of GDP. The UK got its finances under control in the nick of time.

Resilience matters for companies too. Airlines that have strong balance sheets, such as IAG, owners of British Airways, are in much better shape than others, such as Virgin Atlantic, which is seeking a bailout from the Government.

And resilience certainly matters for us and our families. One of the troubling statistics the crisis has revealed is how many people do not have an emergency fund of even a month’s income to tide them over.

Building up some savings is cited as the leading aim of people once the economy recovers. That will hold back any consumer-led recovery so will be a drag on economic growth – but it will be a great benefit to people’s financial health in the future.

Finally, we are learning who to trust in a crisis. At a corporate level, some companies are doing everything they can to protect their workers, while others I am afraid are not.

Some corporate leaders have cut their own salaries, but the whole question of excessive executive pay is bound to resonate around the country in the months ahead.

At a small business level I hope that we will keep going to the corner stores that have kept open when the supermarket shelves have been stripped. They have been a lifeline for many, and we must respect that.

And at a personal level? Well, we have all been the recipients of small kindnesses from neighbours and strangers that remind us of the words, written in 1624 at the time of the recurring plague, of the poet John Donne: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself.’

Let’s keep remembering that too.