Measures which suppress the reproduction of a disease save lives. But when they are relaxed, there will be a second wave of infections
can be a bit of a disappointment to their politicians. On March 12th Emmanuel Macron, addressing the French nation on the fight against covid-19, appealed to their sense of “national solidarity”. In asking them to follow basic health advice and stay at home as much as possible, the president said, he was counting on their “individual and collective discipline”.
It seemed that over the weekend—the Ides of March, as fate would have it—Europe had woken up to the sheer scale of the crisis which it faced: so, to some extent, did President Donald Trump’s administration . In part, this was another example of a cognitive phenomenon that-2, the virus which causes covid-19, has been provoking around the world: exponential whiplash.
The Imperial modellers adapted a model originally developed for influenza outbreaks. They assumed that the time from infection to symptoms, among those who showed symptoms, would be about five days; that people without symptoms would be somewhat infectious, but less so than people with symptoms; that people would vary in how infectious they get. They assigned covid-19 a “basic reproduction number” of 2.4.
The model’s most striking message, though, was not this worst-case scenario: it was how small the effects of less-than-wholehearted interventions appeared to be. Imposing isolation on people with symptoms of the disease, quarantine on their households and protecting the elderly through social distancing—broadly speaking, the sum of British government advice as of last week—cut the height of the epidemic’s peak by two-thirds and pushed it from May to June.
This still did not put Britain quite on a par with its neighbours . In Spain the state of emergency has closed all schools and universities, and almost all non-food shops except dry-cleaners, pharmacies and, again, tobacconists. The number of travellers on the Madrid metro on March 18th was 15% of what it usually is, and parks and promenades in the capital are sealed off.
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