Right that's a very good point - does a lockdown do anything for you in the long run? The advice the government was getting was that a lockdown is a poor strategy because once you release it, infections just rise again so in the long run you've gained nothing. In other words there's no exit strategy.
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Indeed - so then as you say, even on this approach to lockdown, you're buying time. You then have to balance whether the chances of something good showing up in that time (a vaccine, an effective treatment, etc.) will show up, against the social and economic catastrophe that a lockdown causes.
I'd say which way you take has to be based on the severity of the disease. If this was airborne ebola, or the black death on which antibiotics had stopped working, then a lockdown looks like a very sensible idea. But this was never anything worse in terms of IFR and demographic presentation (mainly old and ill people) than a nasty flu year - so the costs of lockdown were, to me, never going to be worth it.
I'm (pleasantly) confused about Sweden too. I thought the Swedish approach was right, but I'm surprised the result was actually *better* than what we've seen in the UK up to this point.