Lockdown costLockdown May Cost 200,000 Lives, U.K. Government Report Shows

Published 24 July 2020

More than 200,000 people could die from the impact of lockdown and protecting the NHS, an official government report shows. Sarah Knapton writes in The Telegraph that as national restrictions were imposed, experts from the Department of Health, the Office of National Statistics (ONS), the government’s Actuary Department and the Home Office forecast the collateral damage from delays to healthcare and the effects of recession arising from the pandemic response. It estimated that in a reasonable worst case scenario, around 50,000 people would die from coronavirus in the first six months of the pandemic, with mitigation measures in place. But in the report published in April they calculated that up to 25,000 could die from delays to treatment in the same period and a further 185,000 in the medium to long term - amounting to nearly one million years of life lost.