MATT Hancock recently made a plea for young people to “save granny”.

This clumsy request was another illustration of the Government’s unbalanced, irrational and immature approach to managing the Covid epidemic. In many ways Covid is a benign disease, in that it largely kills old people, leaving the young relatively unscathed – unlike say Spanish Flu of 1918-20 which killed the young.

This pattern should have allowed us to take a far more balanced reaction to controlling Covid – shielding the old and vulnerable by all means, but letting the rest of us to get on with our lives. Instead we have chosen to seriously damage our economy, the quality of life of millions of young people, and kill thousands of people who have died of non-Covid conditions.

All to do what exactly? Keep some old people alive for a few more months or years? Our reaction simply shows the immaturity and hysteria with which we approach death. The most dangerous pandemic we are facing is not Covid, but human population growth - 7.8 billion people in the world, 67 million in the UK, and rising.

And yet when faced with overwhelming evidence that this growth is wreaking huge destruction on the planet generally, and human lives in particular, we choose to add to this carnage by saving grannies.

By all means we should have spent a few billion pounds on protecting grannies (and grandpas), but we should also be far more accepting of more of them dying, allowing younger people to get on with building their lives and a better society.

Ronald Mcgrath

Langley Way, Watford