That's the point though, and the Imperial paper clearly states this. They don't believe the suppression (ie lockdown) approach is sustainable, and certainly not for the ~18 months they believe it will take for a vaccine to be ready. We've spoken at length on other threads about the health implications of austerity and poverty, and such a lockdown would cause poverty on a nationwide scale.
Like I said, there isn't really an easy way out of this situation, and the Imperial team are clear that locking down the country for a (relatively) short period won't result in this thing going away. It's not a case of the government's approach having this outcome (x number of deaths) and lockdown resulting in 0 deaths. Not at all.
But they also say that suppression, whilst not great is the better of the two options given the current data as we don’t have the surge hospital capacity to cope. Perhaps if we focus on improving that in the next few months, along with knowing more about the virus and its treatment, we will have more options.
“Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.”
In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK (previous planning estimates assumed half the demand now estimated) and with the NHS providing increasing certainty around the limits of hospital surge capacity.
We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently.
