You might be surprised to hear that I don't disagree with this at all. It's just not what I'm worried about.

If we put a lockdown into place right now, I completely agree, we'll probably see slower growth and after a few weeks we'll see what looks like a peak. Then active cases will begin to drop, we'll think that we're over the hump, and there will be massive public pressure to lift the restrictive measures.

What I really worry about is that we'll then see a second, much larger peak, as everyone runs back to the pubs and makes up for all the lost time. The fundamentals won't change during the lockdown: we still don't have a vaccine and the virus is still circulating in the population. The thing I fear is that when that second peak hits, we will have used up some of the most effective tools in our toolbox - in a panic, during the early, relatively harmless stages, where we are now.

I just don't know. You might be completely right. But I'm seeing almost no discussion of the long-term plan and that's concerning me. It really seems like people are frightened and advocating a knee-jerk reaction, rather than thinking strategically. It really seems as though people are trying to minimise the number of deaths over the next couple of weeks, rather than minimise the number of deaths over the next year.

We really need to see what happens in Italy after they lift the lockdown. Without that information, we are trying to make decisions based on severely limited data, and it's wrong to advocate an immediate lockdown with the degree of certainty that I'm seeing in this subreddit.