Damien

It's not a surprise the highest reported - by the press anyway - instances of people being in parks are in places like London with a lot of high density housing. People and families who may not have any private outdoors space.

The lockdown isn't sustainable if you force people to be inside for weeks on end. No one should congregate with people from outside their household and probably shouldn't be just sitting down having a few cans but overall the risk of people being apart in open air is minimal and might actually help sustain the lockdown for longer. Banning exercise or families walking in a park seems counterproductive to me, people will rebel if the measures are too strict or go on too long.

There seems to be a few people who are fetishising ever more draconian lockdown measures irrespective of how helpful those measures would be in slowing the spread of the virus. These are people for whom this crisis has been a boon for their own sense of self-importance and desire to police other people's behaviour, from inventing their own interpretation of the rules they demand others follow to online portals where these wannabe Stasi informants can report on their neighbours. You have people who want to ban all exercise, ban the sale of Easter eggs as they're not essential and have the army on the streets to enforce all of this.

The point of these measures are not to punish the public. It's to stop the virus and liberties should only be restricted to the extent it's effective in doing that. Even if you think we should entire total lockdown for 'as long as it takes' then remember that these measures depend on the cooperation of the public and that cooperation will break if they feel that they're are being penalised and cannot understand the reasoning why. Let people run outside, let them buy Easter eggs for their children at Easter.