The route out
Is the PM on the right path?
When Boris Johnson declared the national lockdown almost seven weeks ago, he thought he was taking one of the toughest decisions of his premiership, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. But that was easy compared with the choices he’s now facing about how to ease the restrictions. On Sunday, he is due to deliver another televised address to the nation unveiling some of those measures. The PM is expected to announce plans to, among other things, reopen more public spaces, allow more children to start returning to school, and get more people back to work. The stakes for Johnson are high. He has to balance the huge economic costs of the lockdown against the ongoing health risks (the UK’s official death toll from Covid-19 overtook Italy’s this week to become the largest in Europe). And he has do this “half-blind because there is still so much that “The Science” is currently unable to tell us about this novel disease”.
The scientific unknowns massively complicate the exit strategy exit strategy, agreed Henry Bodkin in The Daily Telegraph. It’s still unclear, for instance, whether we need to stay two metres apart. The UK guidance is based on research that originated in the 1930s. The World Health Organisation recommends a gap of only one metre. Then again, a Chinese study concluded that four metres was a safer distance. To navigate our way out of lockdown, it would also be very useful to know how many people had already been infected, but here, too, opinion is divided. As for the so-called R number – the number of people every carrier is likely to infect – it “sounds like it comes with the comforting certainty of mathematics”, said Tom Whipple in The Times. But this figure – thought to be currently between 0.6 and 0.9 in the UK – is hard to measure accurately.
The sheer practicalities of easing the lockdown are equally difficult, said John Collingridge in The Sunday Times. How can social distancing work for commuters? If people are kept two metres apart, a 12-carriage train that typically carries 1,000 or more passengers would have room for just 200. The capacity of a carriage on London Underground’s Victoria Line would shrink from 125 to 21; that of a double-decker bus, from 75 to 18. Operating workplaces under these conditions would raise further challenges, said George Parker and Chris
Giles in the FT. Leaked official plans talk of curtailing “hot-desking”, staggering work shifts and installing dividing screens, but that’s not going to be feasible for many firms. There’s also the question of whether companies would be liable if returning staff were to fall gravely ill. In any case, polls suggest that many workers are still very nervous about returning in the first place.
One recent survey suggested that 70% of British voters believe that businesses should stay closed until the virus is “fully contained”, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. But that’s a recipe for permanent lockdown: even a vaccine won’t eradicate the virus entirely. We’re going to have to accept a degree of risk. When it comes to schools, the case for reopening is certainly overwhelming, said The Economist. The closure of classrooms is hurting all children’s education, but is particularly damaging for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The risks from easing the school lockdown, meanwhile, seem fairly modest, given that children are relatively unaffected by the virus, and also don’t appear to transmit it much, if at all. Researchers in the Netherlands and Iceland haven’t found a single case of anyone under 18 passing Covid-19 on to their family.
“The capacity of a double-decker bus would
shrink from 75 people to 18”
As for the rest of us, said The Guardian, we’d better get used to the fact that life is going to change. “We won’t be shaking a lot of hands in the near future.” Nor are we likely to see a return of department stores and other relics of “the preCovid-19 age”. In the future, there will likely be fewer waiters and more delivery drivers. All manner of ideas are being put forward as part of our exit strategy, said Dan Hodges in The Mail on Sunday. The Government wants us to download a contact-tracing app that can identify all those with whom infected patients have been in contact. There have also been proposals to restrict people’s contacts to a “bubble” of ten family members and acquaintances; to introduce some form of immunity passport to those who have already had Covid19; and even to impose a two-pint limit in pubs. We should be wary of such ideas. What we’re debating here are not exceptional measures but a new status quo. And I, for one, am not willing to accept on a permanent basis a “new normal” in which the state tells me who I can meet, while monitoring when and where I meet them.
“Few thought he could do it”, said The Times – but last week Matt Hancock defied the sceptics and smashed his target of delivering 100,000 Covid-19 tests a day by the end of the month. On 30 April, 122,347 tests were completed, up from a mere 10,000 a day just four weeks earlier. The Health Secretary had every right to laud this as an “incredible achievement”. One can quibble with how the figure was calculated, said Laura Hughes in the FT: 40,369 of the tests were regarded as “completed” simply by virtue of having been put in the post. But by setting a “big, hairy target”, Hancock did undeniably change the pace of things: it spurred the setting up of “superlabs” where rooms full of robots have processed 20,000 tests a day. But all this to what end? Is mass testing just a PR stunt? Will it really help us “emerge from lockdown”?
The Government’s immediate priorities are obvious, said BBC News: all medical staff in hospitals should now be tested weekly and, soon, care workers will be too. Those who are eligible for testing also include anyone with symptoms who is over 65, a key worker, or cannot work from home – as well as anyone living with people in those categories. The plan is for all these people to be tested at regional centres or by using home kits that rely on swabs being sent to labs for analysis. But questions remain as to whether enough people are able to access the tests: home kits in particular are in “short supply”.
In any case, if we’re to get people back to work and avoid a devastating second wave of infections, we’ll have to go a lot further than that, said Antonio Regalado in the MIT
Technology Review. People will need to keep testing themselves on a day-by-day basis to ensure they’re not infected. Hence tests will have to be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. We’ll probably need massive testing – “the kind done in parking lots and drivethroughs or at home” – which lets people know if they are infected right away.
And along with these antigen tests – which determine whether people have the disease – we’ll need to roll out a mass programme of antibody tests to find out whether many of us have had it and are thus, in principle, no longer at risk of getting or transmitting it, said Amitabh Chandra in the Harvard Business Review. The problem here is that the science is still unclear. We don’t know how long antibodies protect people who’ve had the virus, nor how long they may go on infecting others after recovering themselves. For now, the only antibody tests available outside high-powered labs are “fingerprick” ones, said Smriti Mallapaty in Nature. And the promise of such tests has been massively “oversold”; most aren’t accurate enough to confirm with any certainty whether someone has had the disease. When we get more accurate ones, they could well play a key role in providing the kind of “immunity passports” that would let people return to normal life: but we’re not there yet.
Testing will never entirely eradicate the disease, said Tom Chivers on UnHerd. And that leaves three possible futures. Two of them – building up “herd immunity” through mass infection; or letting Covid-19, like flu, become “endemic” in the population – involve swathes of people living with, or dying of, the virus. That leaves the third. It’s now all too clear that “there’s no going back to normal until we get a vaccine”.