Conclusion – lockdown has been massively costly and benefits unlikely to have matched it.
We find that the costs of lockdown in the UK are so high relative to likely benefits that a continuation of severe restrictions is very unlikely to be warranted. There is a need to normalise how we view COVID-19 because its costs and risks are comparable to other health problems (such as cancer, heart problems, diabetes) where governments have made resource decisions for decades. Treating possible future COVID-19 deaths as if nothing else matters is going to lead to bad outcomes. Good decision making does not mean paying little attention to the collateral damage that comes from responding to a worst-case COVID-19 scenario.
The lockdown is a public health policy and we have valued its impact using the tools that guide health care decision in the UK public health system. On that basis, and taking a wide range of scenarios of costs and benefits of severe restrictions, we find the lockdown consistently generates costs that are greater – and often dramatically greater – than likely benefits.
Weighing up costs and benefits of maintaining general and severe restrictions is necessary. That is how decisions over a wide range of public policy issues are made – many directly concerning public health issues. While there are inevitable risks in easing restrictions there are very clear costs in not doing so - a policy of “let’s wait until things are clearer” is not reliably prudent. A policy of not easing restrictions until the point at which there is virtually no chance of a resurgence in infection rates rising is not a policy in the interests of the population.
Movement away from blanket restrictions that bring large, lasting and widespread costs and towards measures targeted specifically at groups most at risk offers is now prudent. Such a policy should probably have been started before June 2020; by June 2020 it was urgently needed.
Acknowledgements: None
Ethics approval and consent to participate: The analysis used nationally available general practice-level data with no patient identifiable data. Therefore we felt that Ethics Permission was not required.
Consent for publication: All authors consent to the publication of this article
Conflict of interest: No author has any conflict of interest
Funding: No external funding was accessed to fund the work