We mustn’t yo-yo into bleak Covid hinterland

ON national radio yesterday, the Health Secretary gave an impromptu insight into the Government’s strategy for tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

Ministers will seek to suppress the disease with liberty-limiting restrictions until the ‘cavalry’ – a vaccine and dependable mass testing – rides to the rescue. Of course, that may never happen.

So with Covid cases doubling, and Boris Johnson’s grim confirmation a second wave is looming, we must brace ourselves to be robbed again of our cherished liberties.

Convinced that the infection rise ( afflicting only 0.1 per cent of the population) will lead, inexorably, to more hospitalisations and deaths, the Prime Minister is considering a two-week ‘circuit breaker’ of tougher national restrictions.

Schools and workplaces would remain open, with pubs, restaurants and shops shut, and socialising banned.

If restrictions were eased, the virus would surely return. Then Britain would yo-yo, discombobulated, between semi-freedom and semi-lockdown. Is that really the bleak hinterland we want to live in?

Before lurching towards a new lockdown, the PM must exercise extreme caution. Any clampdown risks sending the economy into a fatal tailspin – just as it rebounds impressively from the shutters first coming down. Fragile consumer confidence would suffer irrecoverable harm. And what of the collateral damage? The needless deaths from the NHS shutdown. The cancer timebomb. The pandemic of poverty and the lost jobs.

Curfews and local lockdowns – in place for 13million – are much more tolerable. Before deciding, Boris should treat the public as grown-ups and show us his evidence.

For the nation’s physical health depends entirely on its economic well-being.