-
People who get sick enough to need hospital care which there isn't capacity for are. It takes a couple of weeks from exposure to hospitalisation and then another 2 weeks or more for people to get better or not.
Haven’t had morning coffee so might be missing something, but wouldn’t the people who need hospital care need it anyway? We wouldn’t have more hospital capacity on 15 March whether or not we had a lockdown in place. Ideally, we would have massively decreasing hospitalisations from 16 March with a serious 2 week lockdown.
I left out buying food, which would be like in LD1, I agree it’s unreasonable to presume everyone (and shops) can stock up multiple weeks of food.
Adhiero-
Lockdown ain't to stop it completely or break it's back, we're way too far gone for that. The first one was to slow the spread and make sure hospital capacity wasn't exceded, and to get a decent track and trace in place so that one things reopen then outbreaks can be targeted. Obviously our track and trace is world beatingly shit so none of that happened and everything has blown up again. Some hospitals are really struggling and things are only going to get worse, lock as much as possible down right now so that capacity isn't overwhelmed, but that's the only real reason to do it, we're not going to stop the virus with a lockdown, it's too prevalent and we can't lock down enough stuff well enough without causing more problems, essential people are essential and need essential services to back them up, it's still going to be spread around. I think all that can be done without a proper, working track and trace is a decent lockdown now to help stop hospitals going over capacity and keep on top of things until the vaccines can start to have an effect overall, I think that may mean more proper lockdowns if things start getting close to capacity again.
snottyotter
Probably not, no. People testing positive isn't a problem as such. People who get sick enough to need hospital care which there isn't capacity for are. It takes a couple of weeks from exposure to hospitalisation and then another 2 weeks or more for people to get better or not. A lockdown needs to last long enough for people to stop being admitted and those that were infected on lockdown-1 to go through the system. So you probably need 4 weeks or longer.
I think in your 'full-blown lockdown' food shops are shut. So you are asking people to go out and buy 4+ weeks food all at the same time. The food retailers can't supply that.