Pieter Cleppe

Five measures that could prevent future lockdowns

That the World Health Organisation hasn’t exactly shone in the coronavirus crisis is now well-documented. It should remind us of the dangers of following one centrally-guided approach to tackling the disease. Thankfully, given how even experts have been unsure about how to respond to this enormous challenge, there was no unified EU response to Covid-19. Instead, European countries have been dealing with the virus using trial and error.

As a result, looking at the responses of European and Asian countries, we can now distinguish five important things that seem to have worked to prevent the need for a strict, economically devastating lockdown.

1. Testing people with mild symptoms

Even though Germany’s first locally transmitted Covid-19 case was before Italy’s, Germany has had almost six times fewer deaths – with a 30 per cent larger population. There are caveats: Germany is lucky that the average age of its Covid patients has been only 49, compared to 62.5 in France and 62 in Italy. And it should also be noted that counting the number of deaths from Covid-19 is anything but straightforward.

But Germany’s testing practices have been singled out by the UK government’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, as key and in the last two weeks, Germany’s curve of infection growth has been flattening.

From the moment it became clear that a Chinese woman – dubbed ‘Case #0’, had visited Bavaria at the end of January, a medical manhunt was launched to trace, test and isolate those she had infected, giving Germany crucial time to prepare. The workplaces of those infected were shut down and all those who tested positive were sent to hospital.

Crucially, testing does not just seem to be about quantity. Last week Italy had conducted 807,000 tests since 21 February, which isn’t that much below Germany’s 1.3 million tests, when compared per capita.

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