The most striking thing about the lockdown easing that Boris Johnson just announced is how limited it is. Single parents and those who live alone will be able to form a support bubble with one other household; churches and other places of worship will re-open for individual prayer, and zoos will be able to admit people to their outdoor facilities.
Listening to Boris Johnson, on the day that Professor Ferguson claimed an earlier lockdown would have halved the death toll, it’s clear that the UK is going to come out of lockdown very slowly. Johnson talked about how the government has ‘to proceed with caution’ and warned that ‘this epidemic has a long way to go.’ The Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Adviser were even more adamant on these points. Chris Whitty stressed that the government might have to tighten things up again in winter as the virus would have advantages then that it doesn’t have now.
The obvious danger for the government is that it ends up in a situation where the UK has one of the largest number of excess deaths in Europe and then a weak recovery because of how slowly the lockdown is lifted. The economic cost of being in lockdown is greater when your economic competitors aren’t – which is why so many business leaders and ministers and MPs are worried about the current 14-day quarantine for nearly everyone arriving in this country.
At the press conference, Boris Johnson and Whitty and Vallance were repeatedly pressed on what they think they got wrong. Johnson’s response was to say that ‘it’s too early to judge ourselves.’ But as I said in the magazinae last week, there are areas where the changes in government policy are an implicit admission that mistakes were made in handling this new disease about which so little was known. Boris Johnson would do well to acknowledge this point. He might find people more receptive to this kind of candour than he’d expect.
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