Should we plan for regular 'circuit-breaker' coronavirus lockdowns? - New Scientist News

New Scientist Default Image — Belfast in Northern Ireland on 14 October. A circuit-breaker lockdown is currently in place there

With cases of covid-19 rising in most parts of the UK, there is fierce debate over the best way to respond. While some people argue for a “let the virus rip” strategy, others want increasing social restrictions, up to and including full lockdown, as happened in the pandemic’s first wave.

But is there another way? One idea gaining ground is that countries should hold regular pre-emptive lockdowns, each lasting about two weeks. They could be timed to coincide with school holidays, minimising disruption to education. In the UK, this would mean having these shut downs around every two months.

The concept may sound similar to the short, sharp, “circuit-breaker” lockdown, an idea that has been advocated by some scientists advising the UK government, including chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance. Northern Ireland began such a lockdown on 16 October and Wales has announced it will do the same from 23 October.

But there is a crucial difference between these strategies: the idea is that pre-emptive lockdowns would happen periodically, even when a country’s coronavirus case numbers are relatively low. The advance knowledge of when they are due to happen is supposed to reduce the impact on businesses, while the fact that they are short and have a definite end point could make them more bearable for the public.

It is hard to work out exactly what effect this would have on virus prevalence, but it should regularly reset case numbers to a lower level. At best, it could mean avoiding the longer kind of lockdowns seen in the pandemic’s first wave.

This year, there has been growing appreciation of the toll on mental health caused by stopping people mixing with their friends and family. Pre-emptive circuit-breakers may lessen this burden slightly. “The specified length of time reduces uncertainty, and it is uncertainty that often promotes anxiety and poor mental well-being,” says Charlotte Hilton, a chartered psychologist based in the East Midlands, UK.

Businesses like pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops would still have to cope with a loss of income: if two weeks of lockdown were scheduled every two months, they would be closed around a quarter of the time. Yet if they knew when these shut downs were coming, they may be able to financially plan around them more effectively.

Unfortunately, if a lockdown is suddenly announced, then firms lose out on the advantages of forward planning. As such, it is too late to gain those kinds of benefits from any immediate circuit-breaker lockdowns that may be about to happen this time around.

How can we know if pre-emptive lockdowns would be better than the alternative approach of tightening social restrictions only when cases rise and loosening them when numbers fall? This kind of strategy hasn’t been tried anywhere in the world, so we can’t yet measure its effects on actual covid-19 cases, mental health or the economy.

But a modelling study by Graham Medley at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and his colleagues suggests that a two-week, UK-wide lockdown at the end of October would halve deaths from covid-19 between then and the end of this year. Because health is a devolved matter in the UK, a decision to take such action would have to be made by the respective governments of the four UK nations. When that paper was written, an October lockdown like the one proposed would have been pre-emptive. The work has been put online but isn’t yet published.

As coronavirus case numbers are climbing in most parts of the UK, the debate has turned to whether current local restrictions are enough or if the four UK nations need a full, non-pre-emptive lockdown.

This would be similar to actions taken by Israel last month, which began what was supposed to be a short three-week lockdown in response to rapidly rising cases. Although it had to be extended by one week, the country has now started easing restrictions.

In the UK, members of an independent advisory panel on the coronavirus called Independent SAGE last week called for a full and immediate lockdown across the whole of the country lasting two or three weeks, plus several further weeks of slightly less severe restrictions.

Independent SAGE member Christina Pagel at University College London says regular pre-emptive lockdowns wouldn’t be needed if the UK used this proposed shutdown to revamp its test and trace system. “We do not want to keep closing things. To plan for that is an admission of failure,” she says.

Michael Edelstein at the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, says planning ahead is vital, but rather than lockdowns happening at set dates, it would be better for countries to have agreed infection thresholds that trigger them. “You don’t have time to debate it for weeks.”

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