In my opinion, we are already in for a very serious recession which could trip into depression unless we have a balanced and sequential plan to ease the lockdown. We are facing the possibility of small business owners being ruined,mass unemployment, the destabilisation of private pension funds,house prices falling sharply and peoples ability to afford retirement and then care home fees severely compromised. I could go on.
The UK government could run out of international borrowing capacity late summer and unilateral MMM could have serious implications that would be difficult to pull back from. The stark reality is that the working population has to be guided back to work. The old and vulnerable have to be shielded and we have to start living with and managing risk.
A major problem, is that outside the armed forces and probably the front-line of the NHS operational excellence in the public sector is clearly patchy. We clearly have not got sufficent traction on testing early enough, largely it seems because we didn't have the capabilities. We seem fixated by the Imperial College model as a political 'comfort cloth'. Public Health England have many questions to answer, as do the NHS procurement and planning. The lack of effective early engagement with relevant private sector firms seems real despite the PM's Dunkirk exhortations.
To homogenise an R value now across the general population,hospitals and care homes to me doesn't make sense in risk management terms. If we are now being told that care homes and hospitals are the 'hot sectors', then as they are by definition contained units, it should not be the generalised metric for unlocking the general population.
Without comprehensive testing and monitoring to understand absolute infectivity and sector & geographical patterns, how do we allocate resources and make local decisions? Without a ready supply of good quality face-masks & gloves how adequate is social distancing for worker safety in public facing jobs? Can work places be redesigned to reduce atmospheric transmission ? Or is it that as the death rate 16--50 appears quite low then for society this is an acceptable mortality to salvage the economy.
It's not up to me but I think we need a mature national dialogue rather than this dumbed down patronising approach. Sometimes it seems that the public health rationale just revolves around how much kit we have !!