@herecomesthsun
On the economics side, while I agree that the spread of covid itself would have an economic affect so absolutely you can't consider the economy and health in isolation, we haven't actually tested the premise that society would grind to a halt under the burden of disease if we hadn't locked down and no European economy (except possibly Sweden) has tested this either. They have all locked down before seeing what would happen.
I think it's very unlikely that for European economies, the economic consequences of not locking down would have been worse than what has happened to the economy (except possibly if a zero covid approach had been taken and this had worked and been maintained, which is a very big if).
If you close a pub for 6 months it makes no money and has ongoing costs. If you let it open but trade is depressed due to staff sickness / people being nervous to eat out etc. it still makes some money. And around 25% of people in the UK have had covid anyway so it's not like we have completely avoided the issue of lots of people getting covid.
And in any case epidemiologists are not the right people to advise on the economic consequences of covid restrictions. The Chancellor has always been fairly anti-lockdown and I trust him more on economics than epidemiologists.
@SonnetForSpring
Epidemiologists have consistently called for a greater degree of lockdown at almost every point in the last 15m. Ferguson considered and essentially recommended the key policies of lockdown in a paper in March 2020. There is maybe a semantic issue as to what counts as a lockdown but I would call not being allowed to see family inside and hospitality businesses being closed "lockdown" and that has been the case for much of the last 15m. Many epidemiologists wanted us to spend more time in stronger lockdowns than we had.
Now many, though not all, epidemiologists are calling for some degree of restrictions to continue. I suspect they are not calling for full lockdown again because they know there is currently no political will for it.
But are you suggesting that covid could have been controlled by non-lockdown measures alone if we had acted quickly enough? If your alluding to the idea of closing the border the minute the first case of covid was found and then isolating anyone infected, then I suppose I understand the argument, but there is no scientific consensus that that would have been possible in the UK or effective at preventing covid from spreading. Even Australia has had multiple lockdowns.
As for the idea that other mitigation measures should remain in place now, what is this intended to achieve? Cases are growing fast with these measures in place so the measures are not keeping R below 1. Is there reason to think that wearing masks on public transport (say) will actually reduce overall case numbers over a period of time or will it just push cases into the winter (which is what Whitty seemed to be suggesting). Would the current wave peak at roughly the same number of cases regardless of how fast case numbers grow or would it peak higher if we drop masks in a week's time? Or quite possibly it will make no difference at all because public transport and shops are not the main place that covid is spreading relative to hospitals, private households, schools and masks are not particularly effective. These are really complicated issues and it isn't stupid to have a different view on them.