Research suggests 25% of Britain could have avoided lockdown during the covid-19 pandemic

Research conducted by De Montfort University in Leicester has concluded that 25% of Britain could have avoided lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The academics at De Montfort assessed 6 characteristics for each of the 632 parliamentary constituencies. These characteristics were vulnerability, population density, commuter mobility, school mobility, people per house as well as economic output.   

Based on these variables and using artificial intelligence, the study has concluded that a “quarter of all constituencies in Britain could have avoided lockdown and kept their economies alive during the pandemic”.

As well as this, the study states that these constituencies would have benefited from alternative measures one of which being the use of protective cordons which would have attempted to prevent incoming infections entering the area. 

Dr Raymond Moodley, who is one of the authors of the work has said “While much has been done on monitoring the effectiveness of the lockdown and predicting infection and mortality rates from COVID-19, very little is publicly available on the modelling of alternative measures. By cordoning off lower-risk constituencies, we could have allowed more than 25% of the population to move more freely within their respective regions, which would also have driven almost a quarter of Britain’s economic output”. 

Just some of the areas cited as suitable for alternative measures to the lockdown we have seen include Huntingdon, Bath, Brighton Pavilion, Halifax, Lincoln, Milton Keynes, West Aberdeenshire, and Inverness.

The authors of this work argue that, based on what they have found, the government should have offered localised lockdown, mixed with other measures. Their findings have been passed on to the Parliament’s Knowledge Exchange Unit, which deals with pandemic containment.

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