It’s a false dichotomy- control the virus or have a functioning economy.
If viral spread is rampant people won’t want to come to work, people won’t want to use businesses and services, money won’t be spent.
If viral spread is rampant people won’t want to come to work, people won’t want to use businesses and services, money won’t be spent.
Those who get sick won’t be able to work, and costs for healthcare will mount. Those who lose jobs will be poorer and have less money to spend on goods and services
If you want to have a functioning economy, you need to control the virus. That means locking down until transmission is very low, ensuring you can identify and rapidly limit outbreaks, and stopping exponential infection growth.
It also means having capacity in the health service to deal with those infections that do occur, whilst also being able to deal with non-Covid illness. Preventing in-hospital spread means having slack in the system, not running at 105% capacity.
What is happening now is the opposite of this- lifting the lockdown with ongoing community transmission, no effective tracking and tracing system, underfunded and neglected local public health infrastructure unable to mandate and enforce local lockdown
An NHS already fatigued from the first wave, now trying to deal with the backlog of non-Covid illness.
And it’s not that it can’t be done- other countries are managing. But we are too arrogant, too careless, too consumed by exceptionalism to learn from those places. Desperate to ‘keep up’ with countries that are unlocking that we are doing it at the wrong time.
And if you think I’m just scaremongering look at where the reproduction rate is. It will take little to push this above 1, and then exponential growth occurs again. mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/ 
