There has been discussion in the UK of another national lockdown to ‘circuit break’ the country. Circuit breaking is having a lockdown to fully get rid of COVID19 and to completely abolish it from the UK. This was proposed by the leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, along with members of the government’s advisory committee SAGE.
The proposal for another lockdown sounds like a good idea to get rid of the virus that is having a grip on everybody’s life. However what’s to say that coming out the other end of it won’t have exactly the same outcome which is another rise in infection rate and a slight increase in death rate. In my opinion it would be barbaric to enforce another lockdown. The country is already at breaking point with mental health soaring with almost double the amount of cases, with more people dying in August of suicide than of covid itself and 1/10 having suicidal thoughts and a recession that will hit us 10 times worse than the banking crisis in 2008. If we go into another lockdown this will only make it worse and the country’s economy will fall off a cliff and has a very high possibility of not recovering.
Britain held their initial lockdown too late in the first place with everyone going in with 7000 cases, this was too late anyway and the country that has handled the case the best is New Zealand and they went into their lockdown with 120 cases which was much easier to contain. There are many other laws the government could introduce before lockdown even becomes a discussion point. Some of these options include pubs having strict monitored measures instead of having a 10pm curfew which I think almost everyone can agree is one of the most pointless laws in place at the moment because people in an intoxicated state, leaving at 10pm won’t get people social distancing.
Another reason for not having a national lockdown is the state of the social wellbeing of our population. In August there was around 555 deaths due to suicide and there was 531 deaths due to COVID19 this means that suicide and mental health is arguably more dangerous and prominent than COVID19.
So should we be less weary of COVID19 and other things that affect our population more? No, that’s not what I’m saying, I’m just saying we need to think about other serious issues that are becoming consequences of COVD19 and give these the same importance as COVID19 itself.