Lockdown could cause 150,000 UK deaths

The deaths caused by Covid-19 – up another 881 today – are shocking. But so, too, are the effects of the lockdown. “Our message was supposed to be: keep working, but work from home if possible,” says one minister. “But that message has got lost.” The Treasury expected three million claimants for its “job retention” scheme. Nine million are now expected. The plan was for about one in five school pupils to stay in class: not just the children of key workers, but those regarded as vulnerable or with special needs. Instead, it seems, just 2 per cent of pupils turned up…

Work is being done to add it all up and produce a figure for “avoidable deaths” that could, in the long-term, be caused by lockdown. I’m told the early attempts have produced a figure of 150,000, far greater than those expected to die of Covid.

This is, of course, a model – just like the model for Covid deaths produced by Imperial College. But estimates of lockdown victims are being shared among those in government who worry about the social damage now underway: the domestic violence, the depression, even suicides accompanying the mass bankruptcies. But these are deaths that may, or may not, show up in national figures in a year’s time. It’s hard to weigh them up against a virus whose victims are being counted every day.