The End of the Beginning
Life in lockdown has become a temporary norm in countries all over the world but it can’t last forever. At some stage, the pendulum will shift and, when restrictions are lifted, there will be a whole new set of challenges to face: namely a global recession and the possibility of further outbreaks. Ian Mulheirn, Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, warns that the end of lockdown will certainly only be the end of the beginning and, to be best equipped for the challenge, the UK should learn some fast lessons from particular governments in East Asia.
When can we lift the lockdown? That’s the question on the lips of millions of people as weeks turn to months in collective national isolation. But while some restrictions may soon lift, the latest research, and a look at how other countries are handling the COVID-19 crisis, suggest we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Beating the virus will be a long haul.
First the good news. The number of daily coronavirus deaths in the UK roughly halved in the ten days after its grim peak at 980 recorded on 10 April. Cases too seem to be falling slowly. And in London, the epicentre of the UK outbreak, the spread of the virus is in full-scale retreat.
But even if these positive trends continue in the coming weeks we will be very much only at the end of the beginning. Imperial College experts suggest that the critical ‘reproduction number’ for the virus in the UK, R, is now below one, meaning that each infected person passes the disease, on average, to just 0.7 people. In other words, the lockdown is putting the virus out of business. But at the same time the lockdown is putting thousands of businesses out of business every day. We are in a race against time to stamp out the virus before the measures required suffocate the economy.
With new infections falling we can begin to think about easing some of the restrictions in the coming weeks. But the headroom to act is very limited. The latest research suggests that even just reopening schools could be enough to send the reproduction number above one, restarting the epidemic and risking thousands of lives. Letting people get back on public transport to return to their open-plan offices would almost certainly cause a new spike in cases without countervailing actions.
So what can be done to ease the lockdown safely? A twin-track strategy of containment and shielding is needed. Containment means cutting transmission even as suppression measures are lifted and can be achieved through a combination of mass testing, thorough contact tracing, and mask wearing. Shielding means, unfortunately, maintaining restrictions on what those more vulnerable to the virus can do. Of people under 60 – the large majority of the workforce – the infection fatality rate has been estimated to be around 0.3%, just one-twentieth of the risk faced by the over-60s. Insulating the workforce from the vulnerable can save lives and livelihoods in vast numbers.
The challenge is that the UK’s containment capacity is very weak. The government is struggling to scale testing capacity as well as the operational delivery of tests. Contact tracing will require a large number of trained personnel but it’s not clear how far along the government’s plans on this front are. Manual tracing will need to be complemented by app-based tracing systems, the privacy concerns about which we’ve barely begun to debate as a country. And whether we have sufficient, and sufficiently effective, protective gear to allow workers safely to board buses and trains once again is unclear.
The division in governments’ responses around the world is stark. East Asian countries – Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan – scarred by the experience of SARS, have deployed sophisticated and impressive containment measures from the start of this crisis. The result is that they have arrested the epidemic at much less than a tenth of the numbers of cases and at a hundredth of the number of deaths seen in the major European countries.
Before this crisis is over, the UK will have to emulate these countries’ integrated containment measures. That will take time and may involve successes and reversals along the way. But the government needs to level with the public about the scale of the challenge ahead and the steps it is taking to meet it.
Ian Mulheirn
Ian Mulheirn is the Executive Director for UK Policy and Chief Economist at the Tony Blair Institute. He was previously Director of Consulting at Oxford Economics, a global economic consulting company, and Director of the Social Market Foundation, an award-winning Westminster public policy think tank specialising in economic research and policy design. Prior to that Ian was an economist at HM Treasury. He tweets at @ianmulheirn.