Climbdown must be gradual or second peak will strike
THE Prime Minister’s first reported command from convalescence was for Team Downing Street to avoid a “second peak” of Covid-19. Perhaps he’s a changed man.
He’s right. We’ve belatedly flattened the curve of peak one but as the epidemiological models show, we risk the virus peaking up again unless the softening of the hard lockdown we have in place is done very carefully.
A second peak would be an economic tragedy as well as a human one. The lockdown versus economy debate is not binary. Shutting up shop for three months is heart attack territory. Having to do it again in mid winter would put UK PLC on a slab.
I’m told that, post-cheltenham, big business gets this and has stabled its most vociferous old mares. They have been reading up on the Spanish flu of 2018 and the differing economic impact it had on American cities.
Seattle, now home to the world’s two richest men, saw the pandemic coming from New York in the East and locked down for the duration. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, they did the same but reopened too soon. Its economy took longer to recover and today its best known corporate is 3M, a leading manufacturer of PPE.
We instinctively look for light. Much hope has been pinned on immunity to get us out of this mess but it’s vanishing.
Another straw being grasped at is the “Asia-may-have-locked-downcausing-us-to-look-silly-but-it’s-goingto-have-a-second-peak-too-don’t-youknow” argument.
If the politicians are listening to this sort of confirmation bias they need their heads examined.
Like those Seattleites of old, they should look East. They should pick up the phone to Taiwan’s vice-president and chief epidemiologist Chen Chien-jen or one of his opposite numbers in Singapore, South Korea or Vietnam. These countries have not completely locked down because their strategy was to aggressively contain any new disease outbreak from the off, as per the public health textbooks. They invested in “test and trace” capacity many years in advance and have far fewer Covid cases.
British business must run the numbers. In the UK, we aimed to cut out 75 per cent of close human contacts to bring an already peaking epidemic under control.
It’s not 100 per cent but necessitated a near-total lockdown. Studies suggest we are hovering at around 74 per cent. In contrast, Taiwan and other southeast Asian countries acted in January before any peak. They therefore aimed for, and still maintain, a 20-30 per cent reduction in close contacts.
The Telegraph met Mr Chen in his office in Taiwan last week (yes, you can still do that there) and he said: “As long as more than 50 per cent of the population reduces 50 per cent of their social contacts then the outbreak can be controlled.” This is what the modellers at Imperial will now be working on. How do we ease up enough to get things running again without letting the virus create a second major peak?
The challenge for the Prime Minister is how to walk this middle path between lockdown and normalcy; how to make the number his epidemiologists give him work for Britain PLC. In this there are a number of prerequisites, the most important of which is getting a nationwide network of test and trace teams in place in order that new cases can be quickly spotted and isolated.
It’s a good idea to get people who volunteered as NHS helpers to do this, but perhaps managed by someone from Sandhurst rather than PHE.
Concise public communications is also going to be vital. Expectation management is also going to be tough, not so much I think for the general public but for business.
How do you adjust business models designed around fractional margins and just-in-time supply chains to a world in which close contacts are greatly restricted?
It’s a tough call. But that’s the likely reality of it for six months to a year ahead.
For those seeking inspiration, turn to The Merchant of Prato by Iris Origo.
Its chief protagonist, Marco Datini, emerged from the plagues of 14thcentury Tuscany an even richer man.
He’s seen by some as a forerunner of the modern businessman. He’s certainly proof that if there is one thing as adaptive to change as viruses, it is capitalism.