Insight
How the EU should co-ordinate an end to the COVID-19 lockdown by John Springford 14 April 2020
European governments hope that contact tracing apps can allow them to ease lockdowns. But much work must be done at both national and EU level before restrictions can be eased. There are growing calls for lifting lockdowns across European countries. Austria and Denmark have already announced plans to open schools. But ending lockdowns without mass testing and contact tracing firmly in place will be very dangerous, as COVID-19 is far more infectious than its predecessors, like SARS. Even with rigorous testing and contact tracing, some curbs on social contact will be needed, and lockdown measures will need to be eased step by step. Once it has been shown that restrictions can be eased while containing the spread of the disease, there will still need to be co-ordination at the EU level to allow travel between member-states. Without trust in each other’s exit strategies, countries will be wary of opening up. COVID-19 is particularly infectious because people without symptoms can still spread the disease. The 2003 SARS outbreak was relatively easy to contain because there was no known transmission of the disease by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic patients. Pre- or asymptomatic cases of COVID-19, by contrast, are infectious, which has meant that they have infected many other people before they are isolated. There are three ways to quash outbreaks of disease if pharmaceutical treatment or vaccines are not available, all of which involve limiting contact between infected people and everyone else. One is case identification and isolation. The second way is general hygiene measures, such as hand-washing, the use of facemasks and decontamination of surfaces that people touch. The third way is to impose general social distancing, and in extremis, lockdowns, to reduce contact between all members of society. Estimates from Imperial College London show that tough lockdowns have been necessary to curb the spread of the virus. More moderate measures, such as social distancing, voluntary self-isolation by symptomatic people and the closure of schools and banning of public events, have not been sufficient to contain the pandemic. R is the number used by epidemiologists to gauge a disease’s infectiousness: it is the number of people that are on average infected by one person with the disease. Across European CER INSIGHT: How the EU should co-ordinate an end to the COVID-19 lockdown 14 April 2020
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