Planet earth is shutting down. Where the world feared China over Coronavirus, now the tables are turned.

In the struggle to get a grip on covid-19, one country after another is demanding that its citizens shun society. As that sends economies reeling, desperate governments are trying to tide over companies and consumers by handing out trillions of dollars in aid and loan guarantees. Nobody can be sure how well these rescues will work.

But there is worse. Troubling new findings suggest that stopping the pandemic might require repeated shutdowns. And yet it is also now clear that such a strategy would condemn the world economy to the grave, perhaps intolerable, harm. Some tough choices lie ahead.

Barely 12 weeks after the first reports of people mysteriously falling ill in Wuhan, in central China, the world is beginning to grasp the pandemic’s exact human and economic toll. As of March 18th, SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind covid-19, had registered 134,000 infections outside China in 155 countries and territories. In just seven days, that is an increase of almost 90,000 cases and 43 countries and regions. The real number of cases is thought to be at least an order of magnitude higher.

Spooked, governments are rushing to impose controls that would have been unimaginable only a few weeks ago. Scores of countries, including many in Africa and Latin America, have barred travelers from places where the virus is rife. Times Square is deserted, the City of London is dark and in France, Italy and Spain cafés, bars and restaurants have bolted their doors. Everywhere empty stadiums echo to absent crowds.

It has become clear that the economy is taking a much worse battering than analysts had expected. Data for January and February show that industrial output in China, which had been forecast to fall by 3% compared with a year earlier, was down by 13.5%. Retail sales were not 4% lower, but 20.5%. Fixed-asset investment, which measures the spending on such things as machinery and infrastructure, declined by 24%, six times more than predicted. That has sent economic forecasters the world over scurrying to revise down their predictions. Faced with the most brutal recession in living memory, governments are setting out rescue packages on a scale that exceeds even the financial crisis of 2007-09.

This is the backdrop for fundamental choices about how to manage the disease. Using an epidemiological model, a group from Imperial College in London this week set out a framework to help policymakers think about what lies ahead. It is bleak.

One approach is mitigation, “flattening the curve” to make the pandemic less intense by, say, isolating cases and quarantining infected households. The other is to suppress it with a broader range of measures, including shutting in everybody, other than those who cannot work from home, and closing schools and universities. Mitigation curbs the pandemic, suppression aims to stop it in its tracks.

The modelers found that, were the virus left to spread, it would cause around 2.2m deaths in America and 500,000 in Britain by the end of summer. In advanced economies, they concluded, three months of curve-flattening, including two-week quarantines of infected households, would at best prevent only about half of these. Moreover, peak demand for intensive care would still be eight times the surge capacity of Britain’s National Health Service, leading to many more deaths than the model did not attempt to compute. If that pattern holds in other parts of Europe, even its best-resourced health systems, including Germany’s, would be overwhelmed.

No wonder governments are opting for the more stringent controls needed to suppress the pandemic. Suppression has the advantage that it has worked in China. Today, Italy added 4,207 new cases, whereas Wuhan counted none at all. China has recorded a total of just over 80,000 cases in a population of 1.4bn people. For comparison, the Imperial group estimated that the virus left to itself would infect more than 80% of the people in Britain and America.

But that is why suppression has a sting in its tail. By keeping infection rates relatively low, it leaves many people susceptible to the virus. And since covid-19 is now so widespread, within countries and around the world, the Imperial model suggests that epidemics would return within a few weeks of the restrictions being lifted. To avoid this, states must suppress the disease each time it resurfaces, spending at least half their time in lock down. This on-off cycle must be repeated until either the virus has worked through the population or there is a vaccine that could be months away if one works at all.

This is just a model, and models are only educated guesses based on the best evidence. Hence the importance of watching China see if life there can return to normal without the disease breaking out again. The hope is that teams of epidemiologists can test on a massive scale to catch new cases early, trace their contacts and quarantine them without turning society upside down. Perhaps they will be helped by new drugs, such as a Japanese antiviral compound which China this week said was promising.

But this is just a hope, and hope is not a policy. The bitter truth is that mitigation costs too many lives, and suppression may be economically unsustainable. After a few iterations, governments might not have the capacity to carry businesses and consumers. Ordinary people might not tolerate the upheaval. The cost of repeated isolation, measured by mental well-being and the long-term health of the rest of the population, might not justify it.

In the real world, there are trade-offs between the two strategies, though governments can make both more efficient. South Korea, China, and Italy have shown that this starts with mass-testing. The more clearly you can identify who has the disease, the less you must depend upon indiscriminate restrictions. Tests for antibodies to the virus, picking up who has been infected and recovered, are needed to supplement today’s, which are only valid just before and during the illness (see article). That will let immune people go about their business in the knowledge that they cannot be a source of further infections.

The second line of attack is to use technology to administer quarantines and social distancing. China is using apps to certify, who is clear of the disease and who is not. Both it and South Korea are using big data and social media to trace infections, alert people to hotspots, and round up contacts. South Korea changed the law to allow the state to gain access to medical records and share them without a warrant. In regular times many democracies might find that too intrusive. Times are not typical.

Last, governments should invest in health care, even if their efforts take months to bear fruit and may never be needed. They should increase the surge capacity of intensive care. Countries like Britain and America are desperately short of beds, specialists, and ventilators. They should define the best treatment protocols, develop vaccines, and test new therapeutic drugs. All this would make mitigation less lethal and suppression cheaper.

Be under no illusions. Such measures might still not prevent the pandemic from extracting a heavy toll. Today governments seem to be committed to suppression, whatever the cost. But if the disease is not conquered quickly, they will edge towards mitigation, even if that will result in many more deaths. Understandably, just now, that is not a trade-off any government is willing to contemplate. They may soon have no choice.

 

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