The United Kingdom has announced a new national lockdown due to a surge of cases and hospitalizations relate

It’s become increasingly clear that we need to vaccinate a lot of people, preserve hospital capacity, and buy time to stop the pandemic. We know that we have an exponentially increasing spread of Covid-19 all over the country, and there will be even more with recent holiday travel and gatherings.
The United Kingdom has announced a new national lockdown due to a surge of cases and hospitalizations related to the new, more transmissible B117 variant. The United States needs to do the same, urgently, before spread overwhelms more parts of the country as it currently has in Los Angeles County.

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We need an emergency plan to stop spread with more drastic policy measures. We had authored the framework for such a plan — termed “Smarter Lockdowns” — over the summer. Many of these points still hold today, and we don’t need to call them “lockdowns” because the point is being smart about stopping spread, not restricting people blindly.
We need to implement absolute — not incremental — restrictions on nonessential venues, including restaurants, bars, gyms, and shopping areas. Those businesses will need additional financial protections in the short run. Anything that needs to remain open (grocery stories, pharmacies, public transport, etc.) must operate at regulated capacity with protection, such as PPE and financial relief, for frontline staff. All nonessential businesses and staff that are put on hold should be repurposed toward vaccination efforts if they can and are amenable to helping.
We also need to repurpose places like hotels and dorms for safer and better isolation and quarantine spaces, and we need to financially incentivize people to use them (punitive measures don’t work as well here and tend to become regressive). We need to mandate masking in any indoor public space that remains open.
We also must stop wasting time and energy harassing people about the outdoors, which we should instead be using to our advantage. In places where the weather permits, keep beaches, playgrounds, and parks open. Also implement more creative but safe outdoor socialization venues. The cost of restricting these places is that people end up gathering indoors in private anyways, which can’t be regulated as easily.
What’s the biggest difference between the benefits of “lockdowns” now versus earlier in the pandemic?
We actually have a tangible goal of how to stop the epidemic more permanently — which is to vaccinate as many people as we can.
We have a major vaccination deployment underway but it needs more hands on deck.
Politicians operate under something called the “Overton Window” — the set of options that are politically feasible. Lockdowns are likely entering that window again because we are at that point. Remember, if we have more L.A. County situations around the country, leaders will eventually be pushed to doing something drastic; people dying without ever making it into the hospital isn’t exactly going to win votes.
We should not wait until that happens.
Regardless what the economy does and the exact impact of any fallout, the researchers offer suggestions for policymakers and health officials.
“We interpret these results as a strong indication that policymakers should take into consideration the severe, long-run implications of such a large economic recession on people’s lives when deliberating on Covid-19 recovery and containment measures,” they write. “Without any doubt, lockdowns save lives, but they also contribute to the decline in real activity that can have severe consequences on health. Policymakers should therefore consider combining lockdowns with policy interventions meant to reduce economic distress, guarantee access to health care, and facilitate effective economic reopening under health care policies to limit SARS-CoV-19 spread.”
To be clear, they’re not advocating against lockdowns or other necessary containment measures, Francesco Bianchi told me.
“We are bringing attention to the costs linked to economic hardship,” he said by email. “We are in full support of public health measures focused on swiftly containing Covid-19, as by no other means this pandemic can otherwise be contained and lives saved.”
But those measures should be combined with other efforts to soften the blow.
“These include economic relief measures, but also other policies that can help the population from the health care, psychological, and social perspective,” Bianchi said. “We also believe that these policies should be directed to those mostly affected by direct Covid-19 morbidity and expected to suffer mostly the recession consequences. We believe that only by combining these two types of policy interventions the anticipated death toll we calculated can be effectively reduced.”