The UK government must implement "short but deep circuit breaker lockdowns" to bring the COVID-19 under control, according to a group of leading economists.
In an open letter published at openDemocracy, the group – which includes the University of Oxford's Professor Simon Wren-Lewis and the former Cabinet Office chief economist, Professor Jonathan Portes – say that the government’s approach to suppressing COVID-19 "risks becoming the worst of all possible worlds."
Partial measures to close the hospitality and other sectors without providing sufficient financial support will not suppress the rate of infection sufficiently to cut the death rate and protect the NHS, but will "almost certainly lead many businesses to close and workers to lose their jobs."
