Technology, tests eyed to help ease virus lockdowns
Co-ordinated approach to pandemic measures important, officials say
BERLIN—Governments battling a virus that has crossed borders with breathtaking speed pinned their hopes Tuesday on tests, technology and a co-ordinated approach to ease the tight restrictions on movement that have slowed the outbreak, but strangled the global economy.
While the European Union looked into creating a COVID-19 smartphone app that could function across the bloc, governors on both U.S. coasts pledged to work together as they planned an easing of the confinement of millions. The main concern is to avoid a resurgence by the virus.
As governments grapple with when and how to reopen their countries for business, the International Monetary Fund projected that the world economy will suffer its worst year since the Great Depression in the 1930s. The forecast Tuesday underscored the dilemma facing world leaders as they strive to balance public health against economic stability.
Around the world, India extended the world’s largest lockdown on 1.3 billion people until May 3. In Britain, new data showed hundreds more people died of the virus than have been recorded in the government’s daily tally from hospitals. The dead include a wave of victims in nursing homes.
New infections appear to have levelled off in much of Asia and Europe, including Italy, France, Spain and Germany, said Dr. Sebastian Johnston, a professor of respiratory medicine at Imperial College London.
With social distancing and lockdowns in place across much of the world, projections that the virus would spread with equal ferocity to other corners have yet to materialize. But without a vaccine or widespread antibody tests to determine how many people are immune to the virus, governments fear new outbreaks.
Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, called for a single smartphone app across the European Union. “It’s important we don’t end up with a patchwork of 27 corona apps and 27 data protection regimes, but coordinate as best as possible,” he told Funke media group.
Maas said a contract-tracing app already being jointly developed by several countries showed that the EU “doesn’t have to copy the Big Brother methods of authoritarian states,” but can instead safeguard both personal privacy and public health.
In China, life is ruled by a green bar-code symbol on a smartphone screen that says a user is symptom-free and can board a subway, check into a hotel or just enter Wuhan.
South Korea and Israel have both aggressively used smartphone data to track the movements of carriers. But epidemiologists say contact tracing must be combined with widely available testing, which has been lacking in places like the United States and Britain.