Ending coronavirus blocks will be a dangerous process of trial and error.
After the new coronavirus spread from China to the world, each country took drastic measures to prevent SARS CoV 2 from spreading, collapsing hospitals.
Everyone has stopped, social gatherings, soccer events, face-to-face schools, where more than 1.5 billion students have been affected. Businesses have had to close and traveling between countries is only a memory, while in some countries the number of infections and deaths increases every day in others they have managed to reach a turning point, this means that they reached the maximum peak of infection and the descent has started on a positive curve.
As governments around the world seek a path forward they must triangulate health, freedom and economic limitations, scientists point out that the reopening of society will be a long road marked by trial error, Megan Coffee researcher of infectious diseases of the New York University stated “It is going to have to be something that we are going to have to take baby steps with”
The numbers to observe in the next phase will no longer be the actual number of cases per day, but what epidemiologists call R (the effective reproduction number), if R is above 1 the outbreak grows, while if it is for below this decreases, today the objective of the blockades is to push R below 1 when the pandemic is controlled, countries can reduce restrictions by keeping R close to 1, when each infected person on average infects another while maintaining the number of new cases In a stable variant, to regulate R, Hong Kong University modeler Gabriel Leung recommends isolating patients and tracking their contacts, border restrictions, and social distancing.
“Although our testing capacity has grown a lot in the past two weeks, we are still not where we need to be” Caitlin Rivers (Johns Hopkins Center for Healt Security). Tracing contacts is a laborious hurdle, Massachusetts is hiring 500 contact trackers, but a report from the Johns Hopkins Center estimates that the United States needs to train about 100,000 people. Cell phone apps could help by automatically identifying or alerting people who have had contact with an infected person, “Public health departments, which are generally not known anywhere in the world to be at the forefront of the technological innovation, they will have to adapt very quickly ”says Leung. But western countries have not yet implemented these systems.
Google and Apple have partnered to incorporate a contact tracking application into their operating systems. France, Germany and other countries are developing applications based on a protocol called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximit Tracing, this is based on short-range Bluetooth signals to measure the proximity between two devices without registering exact locations, this helps to avoid concerns of Privacy.
The questions asked by epidemiologist Nicholas Davies of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine LSHTM at this point are, How can a country ensure that people download an application that provides reliable information and influences the spread of disease? ? And what exactly is a contact? “If I live in an apartment block, will I receive dozens of notifications a day?” Unless these technologies are mandatory, as China has done, tracking would be very complex, Davies adds that the widespread use of the applications will further increase the demand for evidence.
Regarding border restrictions, most countries have already prohibited the entry of almost all non-citizens. In recent weeks, Austria and New Zealand began the quarantine of returning citizens, which further minimizes the risk of new introductions of the viruses will most likely continue for some time, “As soon as travelers are reopened, that could be something the contact tracking system won’t be able to cope with,” says Alessandro Vespignani, disease modeler for Northeast University.
Social distancing is the backbone of the current strategy, which has slowed down the spread of the virus, but also has the highest economic and social cost, most countries hope that the limitations can be relaxed, since the isolation of cases and Tracking contacts helps keep the virus under control.
Choosing a prudent path is complex, Buckee says, in part because no controlled experiment has confirmed the efficacy of different measures of social distancing. “Because we don’t have really strong evidence,” he says, “it is very difficult to make informed political decisions.
