You can always bank on a crisis to generate bad reasoning. On that score, the Coronavirus pandemic hasn't disappointed. Here are some of dodgy arguments about Covid-19 that have been advanced in various media formats.

Featured in tabloid and social media is the claim that lockdown was a destructive overreaction because Covid-19 death rates have actually been no worse than a particularly bad flu season.

This argument neglects the fairly obvious fact that if lockdown hadn't occurred, the mortality rate would likely have been vastly higher. The virus is spread by interpersonal contact. The more of that there is, the more widespread it would certainly have become. So canning lockdown is identical to claiming that flu vaccination is a waste of time and money because the people who got the jab didn't get the flu anyway. That's just silly.

The maker of this argument might like to counter that the retarding effect of lockdown remains unproven, but their argument is also unproven. If you were leader of state who had to make a call on the strength of unproven likelihoods, which way would you have swung?

Add in the fact that a sudden and massive explosion in cases would result in hospital and other medical resources being overwhelmed and unable to cope, especially if flu cases were occurring in addition to Covid. So, deaths from flu and many other ailments would likely be much higher than normal.

Most sensible people would have backed lockdown. Yes, the economic effects are damaging, but no one can predict what infection and death rates would have been without it. Deaths from the virus carry their own devastating impacts. For example, loss of highly trained specialists and key personnel can be very costly. So, no one knows how much worse the economic impact might have been if the virus had been allowed to spiral totally out of control.

Never gamble with what you can't afford to lose. Stick with losses you are able to estimate with reasonable accuracy rather than risking ones you can't even guess at.

Next is the claim that lockdown should continue until a vaccine is found. That suggestion is also woefully inept. Lockdown can only be an interim strategy to buy time. Finding a vaccine might turn out to be merely a chimera - impossible. Or it could take years. HIV took over a decade to conquer.

Productivity provides us with length and quality of life. The longer it remains retarded, the sooner we will die and the less enjoyable our lives will be. If we go bankrupt, we simply won't be able to afford our existing medical system. Nor our creature comforts, such as heating and air-conditioning. Both of those also preserve lives.

Humanism evangelists fire broadsides at people who leave their homes. They ask which is more important, your lifestyle or your life? How would you feel if your behaviour killed another person? But lockdown carries its own risk of death and other health detriments. Those rates can't be calculated, either. What is certain is that they will accelerate as lockdown continues. So the only sensible way to proceed is by progressively returning to normal productivity, hoping that medical and scientific intervention will prevent catastrophic mortality rates. That's the ugly truth of it. You could die from a missed cancer diagnosis through not being able to visit a doctor, when you wouldn't have died from Coronavirus even if you contracted it.

Another dodgy argument that was guaranteed to rear its ugly head was advanced by a UK Labor leader among others. He claimed that vastly higher death rates for black and ethnic minorities resulted from social injustices. Therefore the need to create a fairer and more equal society was evident.

That claim is contradicted by numerous studies that have failed to show relative wealth as a significant driver of Caronavirus outcomes. We know that rates of smoking, obesity, substance abuse and other lifestyle factors that lead to poor health play a significant role in determining who will die from Covid-19 infection. We also know that those rates tend to be higher among lower socioeconomic groups. Correlation does not imply causation. Unless you're a political demagogue. In which case it implies nothing less.

While it is always tempting to push one's own barrow in relation to a disaster, doing so further muddies waters that are already dangerously murky. Most sensible politicians have resisted such temptation. But don't count on politicians to be sensible, nor to restrict themselves to valid reasoning.