Lockdown: time for an exit strategy?
“The trickle is starting,” said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Spain, Austria and Italy took their first hesitant steps this week in “the great return to work”, reopening some non-essential businesses and allowing some children to go back to school ( see page 18). But there’s no end in sight for Britain’s lockdown. Following a meeting with its health experts, the Government was expected to announce on Thursday that socialdistancing measures would remain in place for several more weeks. Ministers conceded as much beforehand. The Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, had earlier pointed out that the number of Covid-19 sufferers in intensive care units hadn’t quite peaked, and that daily deaths would continue rising for 14 days after the peak was reached. “For what it’s worth,” said Robert Peston in The Spectator, “that implies the UK may well be heading for a Covid-19 death toll of at least 30,000 people. Which elevates it well beyond a bad winter flu.”
We clearly can’t start lifting restrictions yet, said The Times. Not when the tally of deaths in Britain from hospital patients with Covid-19 (let alone in care homes) is still rising by around 800 a day. But it is not too soon to start discussing how we’ll lift the lockdown, when the right time comes. Ministers claim such debate risks muddying the “stay at home” message, but the public needs to be given some sense of how their confinement will end: Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, was right to call on ministers to publish their exit strategy. It’s an issue that needs to be debated. “Britain can’t afford to get this wrong.” The stakes are certainly high, said The Daily Telegraph. Officials fear that if restrictions are lifted, the UK will face a second, devastating wave of infections, but the costs of the lockdown are also mounting. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicted this week that if the shutdown lasts three months, Britain’s GDP will shrink by a third in the spring quarter, pushing unemployment figures up by more than two million.
The shutdown is costing Britain around £2.4bn a day, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. To put that figure in perspective, the savings made by all the Tory-led spending cuts between 2010 and 2019 came to about £30bn – “a reduction that Labour, at the time, claimed was killing thousands of people”. In deciding when to lift restrictions, we need to factor in the indirect health costs of lockdown, agreed Paul Johnson in The Times. The reality is that more people will die of other conditions in the coming months as a result of the priority given to Covid-19 ( see page 6). And there will be a longer-term toll from the poverty, unemployment and heath problems created by our confinement. A recent study suggested that the increase in unemployment associated with the 2008-09 financial crisis resulted in 900,000 more people of working age suffering from chronic health problems.
So how should the UK set about easing restrictions when the time comes? One approach, said Nick Powdthavee in The Independent, would be to start by releasing people in their 20s who don’t live with their parents. These adults are, statistically speaking, unlikely to suffer severe symptoms (the estimated fatality rate among patients in this age bracket is 0.03%). At the same time, they’re likely to be hardest hit by the economic consequences of a prolonged lockdown. Releasing them would allow 4.2 million people to go back to work. Schools may also be among the first things to reopen, said Jon Stone in the same paper. Children develop symptoms from Covid-19 relatively rarely, and some believe this also means they don’t transmit the disease much. Another option would be to relax measures on a geographical basis, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer, but that carries its own problems. “If the pubs were reopened in London, but remained shut in Manchester, how would Mancunians react to TV footage of Londoners flocking back to their boozers?”
“One option would be to start releasing people in their 20s who don’t live with their parents”
It’s hard to see people rushing back to pubs or anywhere else, given how effective the “stay home, save lives” campaign has been, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Indeed, there is some governmental concern that they may have “overdone” that message. Officials hadn’t expected the public to be quite so compliant. They thought 20% of children would still be at school by now; fewer than 2% are. Three times more workers than they anticipated have been furloughed. The purpose of the lockdown was to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed, said Philip Johnston in the same paper, and it seems to have largely achieved that end. But the campaign has so “spooked” the public that the Government “now frets that many people may not go back to work, even when advised to do so”.