The
coronavirus, first reported from Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019, has spread to more than 80 countries. Cases top 118,000; deaths exceed 4,200. Governments, desperate to manage the flow of patients into health services, have employed wildly different measures. Belgium, France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, amongst others, have closed all their schools. Italy is under total lockdown. The United States has banned flights from most of Europe. India has effectively closed its borders to all foreign visitors. Israel is quarantining all arrivals from abroad for 14 days.
The UK, which now has 590 cases, will take a different path to the rest of the world. It has been hesitant to deploy the four social distancing measures available to it – school closures, limitation of movement, restrictions of mass gatherings and quarantine. And prime minister Boris Johnson announced last night that the NHS will no longer test those self isolating at home, and that the country will avoid lockdowns.
Yet there is an anomaly amongst the chaos that the virus is reaping across the world that may give the UK pause for thought. China, which was recording more than 3,000 cases as recently as February, reported just 26 new cases on Thursday.
Compare this stat to Italy, which reported 213 deaths from the virus, and more than 2,000 new cases on Wednesday – or even the UK, which reported 83 – and the decline appears even more remarkable. The WHO has recognised it as such, praising China’s response, while a new study in the journal
Science shows that the country’s travel lockdown may have sharply slowed the virus’s global spread.
What, then, should the UK, in the early stages of its own epidemic, learn from China’s success?