OXFORD, April 21 (WNM/BBC Radio 4/Mail Online) - In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the centre for evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, said: “In fact, the damaging effect now of lockdown is going to outweigh the damaging effect of coronavirus.”

“The key is no-one has really understood how many people actually have the infection. You could do that really quickly with random sampling of a thousand people in London who thought they had the symptoms. You could do that in the next couple of days and get a really key handle on that problem and we’d be able to then understand coming out of lockdown much quicker.”

But Heneghan argues that the government had no plan for what happens next:

“You go into a lockdown - you should have a clear exit strategy. You should understand the advantages and disadvantages of what you’re doing. We have failed to look at the data and see when the lockdown actually occurred.”

He later told Mail Online (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8235979/UKs-coronavirus-crisis-peaked-lockdown-Expert-argues-draconian-measures-unnecessary.html):

"We should be reopening society. We need to get a plan in place rapidly, we can’t wait three weeks then slowly open up. As well as major economic issues, austerity will impact people's physical and mental health. The second issue of lockdown is that it's making the public scared to engage with healthcare. People are avoiding going to GPs and hospitals because they believe there is so much infection there that they might catch it [coronavirus]. That’s really damaging.”