Not if we are sensible about it. First point is that trade has to continue, which means goods traffic - lorries, ships and flights by FedEx for example.

Jetting off to summer sun or winter ski resorts cannot happen however.

Business travel kept to a minimum but still happening when essential.

The industry which suffers most is hospitality, especially for places which rely on it like Spain, Portugal and Greece - otherwise, commerce can continue.

I have seen suggestions that they may be, or at least be planning on, running the different phases of the trials concurrently rather than consecutively but I have not looked into this in any detail.

just gut feel.

They have consistently lied. There is not a chance in hell that the Health Secretary could unwittingly have tweeted misinformation. HMG is under enormous pressure and scrutiny over testing. Its default response is to lie.

Hancock is a liar because his boss is a liar.

Do you realise that your posting history on Covid-19 is one long non sequitur??

This suggests a lot of those folk saying they "had COVID-19 in January or February" are wrong.

Academics at Imperial College London estimate that 2.7 per cent of the UK population has been infected

Spain 15%
Italy 9.8%
Belgium 3.7%
Switzerland 3.2%
Sweden 3.1%
France 3%
United Kingdom 2.7%
Austria 1.1%
Denmark 1.1%
Germany 0.7%
Norway 0.4%

While their best estimate was that about 2.7 per cent of people in the UK had now been infected, the researchers were 95 per cent sure that the true figure lay between 1.2 and 5.4 per cent.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/1-in-40-of-us-has-probably-caught-coronavirus-rk2knw9jg

No it isn't Justin. I have always maintained there are only two approaches - if you read all my posts you would see that. If you want to contain it, then close the borders, clean up internally and wait for a deliverable vaccine.

The alternative is to keep borders and economy open and accept the infection rates and deaths which go with that.

I have been entirely consistent in putting out the alternatives.

If you go for the closed borders approach, there will come a time when internal lockdowns can be relaxed as they have to be.

P.S. There is bound to be some thrashing around when every conceivable solution is a bad one.

Perhaps you could spell out how you see that working (if it differs from current policy) for morons like me.

The conclusion of lockdown is that it has to be relaxed sooner rather than later to save the economy.

We can go back to the proposal Quantum put forward aeons ago of trying to keep a lid on things by control/relax/control/relax

Going for an indefinite and complete lockdown is not a solution - what would be left of business at the end of that?

Any form of lockdown has to be done in lockstep with controlled borders, otherwise it is pretty pointless.

To be fair the Tory leaning Times is very critical of the UK's approach. I think you can see the headlines without a login. The main ones this morning:

Boris Johnson takes control of drive for coronavirus tests
Frustration as government admits it’s too slow

Covid-19 risk was deemed moderate by scientists

Coronavirus: Medics ‘threatened with sack’ if they speak of PPE shortages

Delay and dithering mean targets for coronavirus testing are way off

Police at odds over how to enforce lockdown laws

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/

First Covid death in Senegal

So your solution is not a solution at all. It is just a confused and poorly conceived plan to let the virus rip before jobs are lost. Unfortunately you cannot square this circle without radical economic action... far more radical than anything we have seen to date.

The lockdown should be tightened and continue for the next three months at least. Anything less will see devastation over winter 2020/21.

To mitigate this, HMG will have to effectively nationalise the entire economy for a period of 12 to 24 months. We would in effect become a command economy temporarily.

I don't know where to begin with this post, so I won't bother at all. 

I agree we can't turn off the taps completely. Our recovery will take much much longer. There must be a way of providing basic services safely.

I remember straight after the financial crisis after the construction industry shutdown. They wanted to concentrate on new builds but they could not build as the brick factories had shutdown and bricks had to be imported from overseas. This caused a huge log jam with everything, nothing happened, nothing was bought. It took years and years to sort of recover.

We do need lockdowns particularly in certain built up areas but we also need to safely manage businesses so they hit the ground running. After Brexit and being more solo now, it may even be an opportunity to export overseas where other countries have shortfalls after switching off absolutely everything.

I think it is going to last more than 2 months, our numbers will probably deteriorate further until mid-April and then only very slowly start improving. The Italians hope/expect to be able to lift or relax their lockdown in mid-May.

Anyway, the guy doing the plots for the FT has switched to new cases only (instead of cumulative) and 7-day moving averages. This gives a better idea of what is happening and it shows Italy is probably about to turn this around, while the US is the worst.

It also shows how the UK is following Italy directionally, but at a slightly lower level. This makes sense temporally (our lockdown started 2 weeks after Italy) but also in terms of population factors discussed before.

Would that be the same 25000 per day they said they would be doing by now, last week?

Just received a response from HMG to a question I raised with my MP about lack of monitoring people arriving at airports - that issue I raised in February, so took over a month. This is the key part of the response:

----------------------

The actions we are taking in response to the unprecedented threat from COVID-19 are in line with advice provided by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and Public Health England (PHE).  At present, we do not intend to introduce port screening measures such as temperature checks, as the scientific advice suggests that they simply do not work.   However, flights arriving from Category 1 countries have been subject to checks on board with the crew identifying passengers of concern.  Any passengers identified will have been subject to further health screening on arrival in the UK. 

During the containment phase, an enhanced monitoring process was implemented by PHE, to monitor direct flights and identify any ill passengers from affected countries.  On 12 March 2020, we moved from the containment phase to the delay phase.  This has been initiated as there is now community transmission of the virus in the UK, i.e. transmission not directly related to travel; so this has made interventions in ports of less relative importance. 

With the shift to the delay phase and commensurate policy changes, the PHE port health approach has changed to a “warn and inform focus”, which consists of the following actions:

• Announcement on all flights: All aircraft arriving into the UK will provide an announcement prior to disembarkation.  A notice to the airline community (NOTAM) from the Civil Aviation Authority will enforce this.


• Warn and Inform: All ports will display posters prominently and make leaflets easily accessible for travellers, replacing these as updated materials become available.


• Enhanced public health support at ports: Public Health England’s Heathrow based Health Control Unit (HCU) will provide enhanced support with consistent 24/7 public health advice to all English airports and they will arrange to meet with each airport individually to better understand and give advice on the local arrangements i.e. we are focusing on the provision of information by providing airlines and airport operators with posters and leaflets with the latest advice, symptoms and what to do if passengers get them. These materials are available at all international airports, ports and international train stations. 

Our advice is under continual and ongoing scientific evaluation and such advice is being monitored regularly.  If the scientific advice says that the safety of our country requires a further change in policy then we will, of course, take the appropriate actions. 

-------------------------------------------------

The part in BOLD - if that is the case, why did pretty well every country in the Far East introduce port screening measures?

The lack of testing and the inadequate supply of PPE for frontline staff (20-25% are off work and not being tested) is scandalous. In terms of testing the govt should be honest and say that they had a completely different approach until mid-March (herd immunity) and when they changed policy and they focused on suppression again, it was too late to have a proper testing regime in place and we are now competing with so many other countries globally. They are not being honest though, because they are so used to be lying and be getting away with it.

The lack of adequate supply of PPE to frontline staff is just unforgivable.

I totally agree

Take the hit now if we don't we could be back to square one in December 

Again you'll find that until mid-March  the govt was comfortable with letting this infect most of the population ('we cannot stop it' etc.). It sounds like that this was not just a policy of this govt only, but a long established Whitehall protocol going back to the Labour years. 

It was probably one of the most idiotic policies ever.

Quite. Lie upon lie. And manslaughter to boot.

I wish you would stop using such emotive language.

There are flawed policies, lack of joined up thinking, cock-ups and errors. To ascribe everything to a "lie" devalues the term.

No doubt things are being covered up as people race around like headless chickens in a slaughterhouse, but there will be a time for analysing lessons learned and things that went wrong.

Look at the response from HMG to my concerns about lack of port screening measures in February - there was clearly a flawed policy at work and they are trying to smooth it over, but I would not accuse them of "lying" - complacency most certainly.

Why?

Its a case of cure being worse than the disease. Many more will die from economic destitution, poverty and mental/physical health related issues than the virus itself. 

If the virus was like MERs or SARS 1, then fair enough, but this is harmless to 99% of the population. 

Just let it rip

falsehood

untruth

fib

fiction

inaccuracy

misstatement

fabrication

deception

distortion

deceit

disinformation

untruism

misstate