With today's projections from the OBR of the economic impacts of the whole lockdown-orientated strategy, there is some correlation to showing how unsustainable the strategy is and has been so far:
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https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1331678047435706368)
Apologies I couldn't find the original source link for the chart so just pasted the tweet link I found it via.
We are second worst, with fellow lockdown countries of Spain, France, Italy and Belgium also up among the worst, while Sweden is clearly among the better performers, although Ireland has fared well surprisingly despite having an initial lockdown.
Spain is likely to have been hit hard by the loss of tourists, which is unlikely to have been such a big issue for those countries which saw falls off 5% or less. In fact of you asked a fairly decent sample size, with the noticeable exception of Ireland, most people would most likely travel to those countries hit hardest more than those with lower levels of impact.
Ireland has probably been insulated by having a fairly high level of tech companies due to their low tax rates. Meaning that there's little need for them to go somewhere to work.
Also another factor is likely to be how much people travel about within a country for work. London draws a LOT of people into it, if you stop doing that then you harm the companies who exist to provide services to those workers. However it's not just London, but Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, etc.
Conversely other than Dublin (1.2 million people) the next largest city is Cork (0.2 million). Whilst the UK's 6th largest city (Sheffield) has double that population (0.4 million) and it's only once you get down to the 15th largest city (Liecester) that you strat to see cities of a similar size.
However then the third largest city, Limerick, has a population of 100,000. That's like a large town, probably of not that great a note when compared to most of our larger towns or or cities. For instance Basingstoke is also about 100,000 as is the whole of the borough of Guildford.
As such chances are the risk of spread is much reduced and so the need to lock down isn't as great. As one of the big risks is close proximity to someone with the virus. Well at 69 people per square km in Ireland vs 429 people per square km in England and 4,600 people per square km of Dublin vs 5,700 people per square km of London and 4,700 people per square km of Manchester the risk of infection is much higher in much of the population of the UK.
However it does highlight what a blunt instrument lockdown is and that is better to try other methods before if we are able.
However there's limited other options which are likely to provide the same level of benefits.
For instance, even the most favourable evidence shows that mask wearing is only going to have limited impact. Whilst vaccines take time to develop.
Maybe, to protect us from any future virus, we should be looking to reducing how tightly packed that we are in many of our cities. (Bringing it a vaguely rail related point) maybe we shouldn't be reliant on such overcrowded trains to get about (not that rail travel is that risky for Covid-19, although that's no guarantee for other virus, but rather it highlights just how tightly packed or cities are).