Is easing lockdown too soon a bad idea?

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www.google.co.uk/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/coronavirus-scientists-warn-easing-lockdown-could-lead-to-resurgent-second-wave-11970945

Yes

It shouldn't be even thought about for another 8-10 weeks

Well yes, otherwise it wouldn't be 'too soon"....

The answer is in your question.

Yes.

How long was lockdown in China? We’ve only had 3 weeks here.

No shit sherlock

Well yes... ‘too soon’ will be ‘too’ soon.

I will be clearer, do you think lockdown should stop in a few weeks?

I would like it to but no, it shouldn't.

No it shouldn’t, and I don’t think anyone has indicated that it will?

No of course it shouldn't stop in a few weeks!

Ireland has extended the lockdown til 5 th May
It will be interesting if UK chooses a different date as Ireland and Northern Ireland / who follow UK laws, have a border.

No it shouldn't and rules should be tightened. People breaking those rules should be fined heavily. It's clearly not working well enough as it is.

In other countries, you have to get permission to leave your house which you have to be able to show when asked. If you don't have it you get fined and repeat offenders face jail time.

This is a marathon not a sprint. Restrictions can only be relaxed once one of three things is the case. Either a significant portion of the population has had Covid-19 and is now immune, or an effective treatment or vaccine is available, or the virus is exterminated from the British population.

(My understanding is the current restrictions are not enough to make the third of those happen, and we'd still need to worry about reinfection from abroad if it did).

We're not even at the peak number infectious yet. We need to be well past that before restrictions can be lifted.

This assumes, of course, that the government and people carry on holding the view that preventing avoidable deaths is worth the economic disruption it's causing.

Without a vaccine there will be a 2nd wave.
And maybe a 3rd.

To prevent a 2nd wave we would have to lockdown to the point of starvation, which is clearly undesirable.

We need to be realistic about this. This pandemic is happening and it will continue to happen. All we're doing here is spreading it out enough so as not to cripple both health and key services.

We need to be careful not to collapse our economy as that will kill many more again.

This is already a relaxed lockdown. In my home country there's a lockdown, and curfew. Nobody out, beaches closed, shop for essentials only then go straight home, no loitering. Exercise strictly within your own area, maintaining social distancing at all times. 8.30pm pm siren goes off and that's it, everybody inside you can't even sit on your verandah. Extreme sounding maybe, but Covid cases are in single figures and have been for a while. That wouldn't work here, the sense of entitlement and will to look for any excuse not to comply with something for a little while that would benefit all in the long run, is too strong. Right now I'm hoping UK isn't still under 'lockdown' in Summer, best we can hope for.

Someone lit a fire at my local park today and caused damage so I'm not in the best of moods about lockdown etc. I'm 5 minutes walk away and been doing 1 hour early morning exercise there. No more - it's been closed.

Am truly baffled at the amount threads with titles like will lockdown end soon? when will schools go back? should we relax the rules? The answer is always the same. No one knows when it will end but with so many people breaking the rules it's not going to be anytime soon. Obviously ending it too soon but is a bad idea.

Define 'too soon'.

It is not possible to eradicate the virus through lockdown, we are just trying to prevent the number of people needing the NHS at once overwhelming our medical resources, ie, to spread out the number of sufferers at a time.

The longer the lockdown the greater the damage to the economy on which we all depend, which finances the NHS. It's not really possible to measure how many deaths could result from that.

There are signs that the lockdown itself is causing harm, probably deaths, from people not calling for medical help for other problems, from pausing treatment programs, from domestic violence, from suicide etc, which will get worse under longer lockdown and may be greater than the harm that the Covid causes.

The only way to more-or-less eradicate Covid is a vaccination, and there is little suggestion that one will be generally available within a year. In the meantime we are going to have to accept that more and more people will catch it, hoping that a) the NHS will be able to deal with the numbers needing care at any point, b) sufficient people will develop long-enough-lasting immunity to dampen the outbreak down and, of course, c) that it will mutate and become mild or harmless.

There is the chance that it will mutate and become even more virulent, but I don't think that is thought to be particularly likely.

Until a vaccine is generally available we will just have to live with it, just as we live with seasonal 'flu, specially in the years when the vaccine isn't very helpful. Numbers aren't kept but it's thought that about 15,000 - 17,000 excess deaths per year are caused by 'normal' 'flu. I'm sure many people would want to accuse me of being heartless by saying that and say 'how would I feel if my loved ones died of Covid?' and the answer is I'd feel as awful as if they died of any other cause, which may have been the result of lockdown, and I hope we can get round the awfulness of people dying alone. But hating the prospect doesn't change the facts.

Now, hands up who would like to make the call on when we ease lockdown, how fast and in what manner ...

It is working well enough. That is, we still have capacity within hospitals. Everyone who needs treatment is getting it. That is the actual point of the lockdown: to slow the spread (aka flatten the curve) so that the health service is not overwhelmed, causing avoidable deaths.

Whenever the restrictions are eased we should definitely expect another increase in infections, and correspondingly in deaths. Once again, the sign that they've got the timing right will simply be that the health service is not so overwhelmed that there are more patients needing ventilators than there are ventilators. And so on.

I don't know when they should ease the restrictions, but I think we should be clear that the virus will still be out there, and most of us should expect that we will get it. Or indeed, have already had it, with or without symptoms.

**Amicissima nothing more to add other than I completely agree with you.

8958 deaths so far in UK & still rising

Too early to go back to normal

Everyone is still at risk

The message is clear, STAY AT HOME

There is capacity in the hospitals and the economy is in meltdown. If we don’t come out in May, there isn’t going to be much left to come out to. It’s that simple. We’re far past the point of stopping this virus and there isn’t a vaccine. There’s no point in #stayhome once the curve has flattened, and it is flattening infections wise.

The truth is that HM Government are well behind the curve. We still do not have a testing,recording,tracking regime nor do we have a national official tracking app or an exit strategy. My feeling is that the UK will become a pariah state because of this whilst other countries recover. The funeral pyres will get higher and the economy will be in tatters. Unless of course there is a sudden uptick in strategy or a vaccine.

I reckon they’ll give it a few more weeks (not many) and then wind in the furloughing etc to people in the shielded groups only. Everyone else back out there and get on with it.