Lockdown must be extended - but terrible economic toll is growing: The Yorkshire Post says

While the country’s death toll is desperately grim, the very worst fears that the NHS would be completely overwhelmed without enough bed capacity to treat Covid-19 patients have thankfully not yet come to fruition. Equally, the frontline medical staff risking, and in increasingly tragic numbers giving, their lives in the fight against the virus desperately need all the public support they can to minimise infections taking place.

But the review must offer some form of feasible exit strategy, even with the entirely understandable caveat that precise timings on when lockdown can be lifted are near-impossible to give at this stage. While the pandemic is having appalling consequences for the nation’s health, there is a parallel economic crisis unfolding.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has reportedly told colleagues that Gross Domestic Product could shrink by 25 to 30 per cent between now and June.

To put that into context, during the global financial crisis when the UK economy suffered its deepest recession since the Second World War, GDP shrunk by just over six per cent between the first quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009. It then took five years for the British economy to recover to the size it was before.

Beyond considerations affecting the finances of every household, there are the matters of months of lost schooling for millions of children and the mental health toll on many of the current measures.

There are no easy choices here, no simple solutions for ministers.

Lockdown should clearly be extended but the costs of doing so cannot be dismissed.

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

Almost certainly you are here because you value the quality and the integrity of the journalism produced by The Yorkshire Post’s journalists - almost all of which live alongside you in Yorkshire, spending the wages they earn with Yorkshire businesses - who last year took this title to the industry watchdog’s Most Trusted Newspaper in Britain accolade.

And that is why I must make an urgent request of you: as advertising revenue declines, your support becomes evermore crucial to the maintenance of the journalistic standards expected of The Yorkshire Post. If you can, safely, please buy a paper or take up a subscription. We want to continue to make you proud of Yorkshire’s National Newspaper but we are going to need your help.

Postal subscription copies can be ordered by calling 0330 4030066 or by emailing [email protected]. Vouchers, to be exchanged at retail sales outlets - our newsagents need you, too - can be subscribed to by contacting subscriptions on 0330 1235950 or by visiting www.localsubsplus.co.uk where you should select The Yorkshire Post from the list of titles available.

If you want to help right now, download our tablet app from the App / Play Stores. Every contribution you make helps to provide this county with the best regional journalism in the country.

Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson

Editor