Editorial: London cannot be kept under lock and key a moment longer than planned
Over the past fortnight, since new national lockdown restrictions came into force, there has been something of a suspicion abroad in London and the south-east that our part of the country has been collateral damage as a result of increasing cases and deaths elsewhere in the country.
To our untrained eye, new data released Tuesday suggests such suspicions have a degree of grounding. It is a fact – a cold, hard fact – that deaths in the capital are nowhere near where they were in the first wave of the pandemic.
There are, of course, things we must bear in mind; chief amongst those is the mystery of ‘long covid’ about which far too little is known. Cases are up, albeit flattening – and surely that will continue over the next fortnight.
Read more: Tube use peaked on the last day before Lockdown 2
But if the Government’s strategy remains to avoid deaths from Covid-19, then in London, it is succeeding. It was succeeding a fortnight ago, too.
Even when looking at hospital admissions, the capital – home to 8-9 million people, one-sixth of the total population and by some distance the area with the most social mixing, densest housing and essentially the perfect petri dish for transmission – barely turns the dial.
What does that mean? For one, it means that London cannot be kept in these interminable restrictions for a single day beyond December 2.
If new ‘tiered restrictions’ come into place – we are, by this newspaper’s count, approaching the third different iteration of allegedly definitive tier systems – then it is inconceivable that London could be plunged into Tier 3, and frankly it is difficult to justify Tier 2 either.
No, this doesn’t mean us all piling onto buses and tubes with reckless abandon on December 3, going back to the good ol’ days of rush hour strap-hanging and commutes complete with eau d’armpit. But it does mean giving the capital’s businesses a chance to survive.
The damage done to so many of our industries, the risk of other maladies going undiagnosed, the mental toll on millions of people struggling to make ends meet – all must be part of the calculations made by Government about this once vibrant city and its suddenly imperiled future.
London is the economic engine of the country.
The sooner it gets going, with the prospect of a vaccine now far more real, the better it is for the country. It is increasingly boring hearing about levelling up from a Government as it allows the capital, the ship that has been floating along quite nicely, to take on water.
It may be an uncomfortable truth for many, but take away London, and you can kiss goodbye to the UK’s standing as a global power.
Further lockdown restrictions in London, simply unjustifiable in the capital by any of the available data, would hit the most economically precarious Londoners – from Uber drivers to retail workers to office cleaners.
There is a human cost to lockdown. It is time that was put on a graph, too.