Why we can’t have it both ways
ITALY has closed its schools. Greece has closed its schools. Iran has closed its schools.
France has closed about 120 schools with more expected to follow.
The Paris Marathon has been postponed from April until October.
The European Parliament is moving its sittings from Strasbourg to Brussels because of “significantly higher health risks”.
The UK, where cases of the coronavirus are spiking, is contemplating closing its parliament, to prevent it spreading.
Patients with mild cases there are being encouraged to stay at home as the country’s chief medical officer admits the National Health Service does not have enough beds to cope with the expected number of sick.
In Italy, some hospitals in parts of the country affected by the virus have been forced to close their emergency departments.
In others, army-style field hospitals have been set up outside to test suspected cases and prevent them spreading the disease inside.
So many Italian health-care workers have been infected doctors are being brought out of retirement and trainee nurses are being deployed.
In response to the growing number of cases in Europe, Israel has barred visitors from Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
It has also banned all public events involving assemblies of more than 5000 people.
Defending his government against critics who thought shutting the borders to Italians was an exaggerated reaction to the crisis, its health minister responded: “They said we were hysterical (but) if we hadn’t closed Italy a few days ago, we’d be in the grip of a mass infection today.”
Aeroplanes from Italy are of course still arriving here with enhanced screening and indeed our government is still keen to encourage Britons to visit along with citizens of the United States.
Public events are all systems go here too.
The question, to use a favourite word of Scott Morrison, is which of the two responses to the virus, ours or the approach being taken overseas, is the more “proportionate”.
The Prime Minister made it clear that in his opinion “to date, we’ve been very decisive, to date, we’ve been very proportionate”.
Time will tell if he’s right. And not a very long time.
Even as you are reading this the disease is spreading in Australia.
No doubt the chief of the World Health Organisation Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had other countries in mind when he said this week a “long list” of them were not showing the “level of political commitment” to meet the threat.
The WHO is worried these no doubt other countries “have either not taken this seriously enough, or have decided there is nothing they can do”, adding the virus can only be contained using aggressive measures.
He’s right of course, there is no treatment and no one has any immunity.
It will take time for a vaccine to become available. In the meantime, quarantine to slow down the rate of infection is the most effective government response as it will both buy time for the development of vaccines and lower the risk of our health system being overwhelmed.
At some point government has no real choice but to institute strict quarantine measures or, as a writer in The Times put it, “to follow China’s lead and to lock down their economy to stem its spread”.
The only question is when. As we can see, much of Europe is already at that point.
Should we be waiting until we have a South Korean or Italian situation on our hands or should we move now?
Hopefully we still have time but the window is closing quickly, if it hasn’t already.
Which isn’t to say that the economic consequences won’t be dreadful.
They will, which is why, presumably, the government has responded the way it has.
But as a senior politician mused to me before things took off in Europe, “based on the experience of China and northern Italy, air travel restrictions may be less economically costly than the alternative of closure of schools, childcare, kinders, universities, public gatherings, sports events and the self isolating of everyone in the population who has the choice”.