Robert Peston Robert Peston

The cost of Britain’s coronavirus lockdown is mounting

Thursday’s meeting of the emergency Cobra committee that takes decisions on how to protect us from the ravages of Covid-19 was supposed to be a 15-minute formality, to rubber-stamp a decision, to make no decision at all on when and whether to ease these unprecedented on our freedoms.

But because the telecoms connections for this video conference call were ropey and the ministers chaired by the First Secretary of State Dominic Raab struggled to be understood, the 15 minutes extended to a frustrating 45 minutes.

Even so, ministers did decide to mandate the government’s scientists, on the so-called SAGE committee, to gather the data necessary to inform a political decision on how and when to return our way of life to something that feels a bit more like normal.

So the plan is that, at the end of next week, there should be an announcement of the skeleton of an idea of a possible programme that might allow businesses to function a bit more normally, and for us to be in the presence of (though not close to) our nearest and dearest.

That said, ministers caution me that the current lockdown will continue for several weeks yet, not least because we are some days from seeing the peak usage of intensive care beds by Covid19 sufferers – and, in the words of the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, daily deaths from the terrible virus will continue to rise for another 14 days or so after that peak (such is the lag between entry to intensive care and either death or recovery).

For what it’s worth, 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.

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Robert Peston
Written by
Robert Peston
Robert Peston is Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. His articles originally appeared on his ITV News blog.

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