There were justifications for this in 1918. No vaccine was coming. Countries had to build herd immunity. This time there are hopes of a fast-track vaccine by the autumn. We are learning more about antiviral treatment and clinical management every week. Delay infection by a few months and your survival chances are better.
The Merkel view is that you pick your poison: either endure a hard lockdown until the job is done; or risk on-and-off lockdowns lasting much longer, vastly compounding the economic damage over time. Can governments keep shutting people up again and again with any hope of sustaining social consent? Doubtful.
The Swedish experiment sheds less light on the complex trade-offs than many advocates claim. It relies mostly on voluntary compliance based on Nordic tradition – and abnormally high levels of single households – but there is still strict social distancing.
State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell – a cult hero to some, a misguided ideologue to others – may be vindicated if he is correct that Stockholm and other key regions are already near the threshold of herd immunity. A big “if”. We are probably only in chapter one of this saga.
The British Government will not know the outcome of either the German or Swedish gambles in time to make their crucial decision on the exit strategy. The signs are that Boris Johnson is resisting calls from his own “Laschet” faction for premature lift-off.
Downing Street has been terrorised by the all too real possibility that Britain will emerge with the highest per capita death in Europe – with grim reputational damage to nation, government, and party.
It now has the loser’s advantage of humility and political fear. A stoic UK with remarkable unity behind the NHS may be patient enough to resist temptation. It may be disciplined enough to handle the next phase of this pandemic tolerably well – by comparison at least. Fingers crossed.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
We cannot just sit at home and watch our economies burn
A long standing favourite in my family when I was growing up was a Victorian board game called “The Prince’s Quest: A Fairy Race Game”, a battered edition of which I still have in my possession.
In this simple throw-of-the-dice, snakes-and-ladders type game, each player embarks on a different route to a common end destination, where a sleeping beauty awaits the first to arrive. But along the way the player is repeatedly beset by good and bad fortune, depending on which number they land on.
The game is a good analogy for the fight against Covid-19. One moment, the end seems in sight; yet the next move dashes the player’s hopes. Apparent progress is quashed by repeated setbacks. Though a global challenge, the pandemic is also quite plainly a national race, with some countries apparently doing better than others.
Yet the Prince’s Quest board also carries a warning; “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong”, and that may well end up the case with Covid-19 too. Those that appear to be doing well now, and are therefore tempted into lifting lockdowns prematurely, may in time regret it.
Singapore, widely praised at the start of the outbreak for its containment measures, but now experiencing some of the highest per capita infection rates in the world, may be a case in point. China, too, where there appears to be a second outbreak in the Northern city of Harbin.
Studies of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 show that those US cities that lifted restrictions early were more likely to have been hit by a second, more devastating wave of the infection.
In the UK, the response to Covid-19 was initially instructed by the idea of herd immunity and reluctance to impose economically destructive social distancing measures. That turned out to be a mistake, resulting in high levels of infection and mortality.