How does this differ from what is currently happening?
Originally Posted by: Justin W
The complete lockdown. Here is a comment on The Times, which puts forward an alternative case to keeping everything locked down for as long as it takes:
"Yet more evidence, as if it was needed, that this government's policy is doomed to fail. Stephen Powis' comment that " ….and winter could come and those green shoots could turn out to be not the hopeful green shoots that they thought they might be” says it all. We are facing a lockdown not of 3 weeks, or 3 months, but of 9 months or more, because we've got no proper plan for how to address the true implications of this virus. All we've got is a government bleating on about the need to protect our NHS at all costs, when neither it nor the NHS has the faintest idea about the true threat level facing it, which of course means that no matter how well geared up the NHS might become, no-one can ever know whether it's sufficient. So we must carry on protecting it at all costs, regardless of what those costs might amount to and whether or not they can ever be afforded.
But we do know certain things. We know, for example, from what happened on the locked down Diamond Princess, that this virus doesn't appear to transmit at anything like the rate predicted by scientists. Less than 20% of the complement of passengers and crew on the vessel succumbed to the virus, yet according to our scientists it should have been 80%+. This experience seems to be born out by our limited testing of those self-isolating because of presumed Covid19 familial infection. Only 15% positive results in a population where expected results should, according to those scientists, be far far higher.
We also know that the mortality threat is age- and health-related. If you're very elderly, or have a compromised immune system, or are severely asthmatic, you're at significantly increased risk of dying if you catch the virus. If you're not, your risk, should you catch the virus, is most likely around 1 in 5,000 for the under 40's, rising to around 1 in 300 for those in their 60's, 1 in 125 for those in their 70's and 1 in 15 for those over 80. I use the expression "most likely" because best estimates are that actual cases of coronavirus exceed known cases by anything up to 10 times.
So those who are very elderly or have compromised immune systems are well advised to self-isolate, for as long as it takes to develop a vaccine. Whether they are all prepared to self-isolate for anything up to two years is a matter of choice for them - it isn't up to government to demand that people must do only what the government deems is good for them. They have the right to determine whether or not isolating themselves from the life they're accustomed to in order to prolong their safe existence is a price worth paying.
And for everyone else, we have to ask the question, is the government's prescription one that they should accept. We need to consider whether the social and economic consequences of the prescription are ones we can actually afford. The longer we are kept in lockdown, the greater the damage to our economy - fewer jobs, fewer businesses, massively hiked national debt that will need to be paid for by huge increases in taxation for a decade or more. The longer we are in lockdown, the greater the social cost - huge growth in domestic violence (we've already had at least 9 deaths in the past week directly attributable to the stresses caused by social distancing), reduced educational opportunities, an over-powered police force.
This has to stop. Now."
- I am just posting it to show that there are multiple viewpoints in this and the "lockdown at all costs" approach is only one of them.