PM reverses UK’s virus response

Flanked by his chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser, Boris Johnson didn’t so much announce an escalation in the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis as signal a sharp course correction.
Exactly why the government has changed direction was confirmed later, when the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team, whose epidemiological modelling helps inform UK policy-making, published a bombshell report on its findings with implications for both Johnson and US President Donald Trump. If either follows the logic of the report, there are far more stringent measures to come and long-term implications we’ve only begun to contemplate.
The 30-member Imperial team set out two fundamental strategies in dealing with Covid-19: “mitigation,” in which the aim is not to entirely disrupt transmission to but slow its impact; and “suppression,” which aims to reduce the rate of transmission so dramatically that each case generates less than one additional infection and the disease is stopped in its tracks. You can guess which path China followed once it came to grips with the fact it had a massive crisis on its hands. The UK government’s policy up to now, which it called the “delay” phase, adopted a weak mitigation policy at best.
You can measure the difference in lives. With no mitigation measures at all, the Imperial Team said they would expect 80% of the population to be infected, resulting in 510,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US — and that’s without accounting for the impact on mortality of health systems getting overwhelmed.
By the second week in April, the critical care capacity of Britain’s National Health Service would be overwhelmed.
Suppression at this stage of the epidemic comes with a catch: It will need to continue until a vaccine is found or what’s called herd immunity is achieved, whichever comes first, say the authors.

—Bloomberg

Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion