Part one of a two-piece article.

From the start, those sceptical of lockdowns for managing the coronavirus pandemic have offered three complementary lines of argument. First, a respiratory virus will never be eradicated and as it becomes endemic, the public health goal should be to protect against severe illness. Second, we said science and experience showed that lockdowns might work as a temporary measure to delay the spread and ‘flatten the curve’, but cannot contain or avoid the disease indefinitely. Third, they