It strikes me that as much as this lockdown should have come at least two if not four weeks earlier, it couldn’t have. It would have fallen into the classic trap — if it had worked, people would have complained that it was unnecessary because there were never many cases anyway. A panic whipped up for nothing. The problem with timely and effective risk mitigation is that because it works, hindsight makes it look like it was pointless.
And that’s if the lockdown had been followed and therefore had worked. When we were still at <50 deaths a day, I’m not convinced that compliance for following a lockdown would have been very high anyway. If people are not wanting to follow it even now, where we are on the brink of disaster, it doesn’t speak well for compliance at an earlier stage.
This government is not up for imposing big costly things that people then blame them for when they work or get irate about when they don’t.