UK Edition On March 25, just a day after Britain shut down, economist Professor Philip Thomas, of Bristol University, made a grim prediction.
If the country remained in lockdown for longer than two months, he warned, any lives saved would be wiped out by those lost from the impact of the inevitable recession.
Britain hit that timeline more than a fortnight ago, but restrictions largely remain in place and there is growing alarm among economists that the cure has become far deadlier than the disease.
Prof Thomas now estimates that 150,000 people could die from Covid-19 over five years under the intermittent lockdown conditions necessary to keep infection rates, or the reproduction 'R' number, below one if a vaccine is not found.
But he predicts that 675,000 could die from the collateral damage – far more than the 577,000 deaths predicted by Imperial College London if coronavirus had been allowed to run through the population unchecked. More, in fact, than all British lives lost in the Second World War.
"A nation's economy and its health are so strongly linked that at some point they become inseparable," Prof Thomas said when he released the new figures last month. "Poverty kills just as surely as coronavirus."
Scientists are so worried about the catastrophic costs of lockdown that the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has commissioned research to determine whether the impact of recession will be far more damaging to the nation's health than the pandemic itself.
Arguably, such research should have been carried out months ago.
The Government has been widely criticised for failing to bring in economists early on. When the country went into lockdown, there had been no modelling of the long-term health and social effects of shutting down an entire economy.
Speaking at the Science and Technology Select Committee on Friday, the eminent economist James Poterba, professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said: "There was too little interaction between the epidemiologists and the economics community.
"This is a situation where economics is absolutely essential to inform policy design. The social scientist can spot things that might not be on the radar for the folks that have been trained as medical doctors."
Carol Propper, professor of economics at Imperial College London, recently published a paper suggesting that an forthcoming recession will lead to a significant rise in chronic illness.
During the most intense part of the 2008 UK financial crisis, there was around a five per cent drop in employment. A similar drop in the coming year would see chronic conditions in working-age people rise by between seven and 10 per cent.
That translates to around 900,000 more people with conditions such as asthma, depression and heart problems, the Imperial paper predicts.
Speaking at the select committee Prof Propper, also the president of the Royal Economic Society, said children would be particularly hard hit.
"This is a complex problem in which we have a health shock which has led to an economic shock," she said. "Our research indicates that a one per cent fall in employment equates to a two per cent increase in prevalence of chronic disease.
“Several recessions in the past affected the young, particularly young children. Those recessions cost a long shadow over their lives, and children born in recessions can live a considerably shorter length of life than children not born in those periods."
So far, our understanding of how recessions affect health has been based on the 2008 financial crash. But the economic fallout from coronavirus is likely to be far worse.
During the financial crisis, GDP in the UK contracted by 6.4 per cent per capita over two years. But in March alone, Britain experienced a fall of 5.8 per cent, while the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) has forecast an unprecedented drop of 35 per cent.
It means the health costs from the pandemic could be five times worse than the costs in 2008.
Even the less gloomy predictions, such as those by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, suggest coronavirus will cause global GDP to decline twice as much as the last financial crisis, and could tip the world into a 1930s-style recession.
Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, is said to have signed off on plans to reopen the economy after being warned by Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, that a failure to get the hospitality sector moving could cost 3.5 million jobs.
The OBR has forecast unemployment rising by more than two million to 10 per cent in the second quarter of 2020 alone.
Experts are predicting particularly large rises in depression and anxiety, and recessions tend to lead to an increase in suicides. Between 2008 and 2010, there were 846 more male suicides and 155 more female suicides in England and Wales than would have been expected before 2008. Ireland reported an extra 476 deaths.
Cancer Research UK has warned that the crisis could mean an extra 18,000 deaths from cancer this year alone as urgent referrals across England dropped by 62 per cent, while chemotherapy treatments have been running at just 70 per cent of normal levels.
Since the beginning of March there have been nearly 13,000 unexplained excess deaths, which are likely to be from people not being able to access healthcare, or dementia patients losing routine and access to loved ones.
A lengthy and devastating recession is also likely to bring austerity, which will stop Britain from devoting as many resources to health services, leading to an overall decline in life expectancy.
Following the financial crash of 2008, the increase in life expectancy in Britain stalled for the first time in 30 years. Some scientists even estimate it may have knocked an average of seven weeks off life.
The price of staying in lockdown is simply becoming too great.
As Prof Thomas concluded recently: "A global economic crash could be a much more significant threat to human life. At some point we will have to endanger lives in the present to save those in the future."