Whiplash
Covid-19, at March 18th 2020Sources: Johns Hopkins CSSE; UN; OECD;
national governments; Datastream from Refinitiv*Latest †2018 or latest ‡2020 estimate
§Restaurants limited hours **Total returnNumber of cases
doubles every day...every second day ...every third day...every weekLog scaleS. Korea Italy France Germany Spain Britain
Date of 100th case Feb 20th Feb 23rd Feb 29th Mar 1st Mar 2nd Mar 5th
Total number of cases
Cases per
100,000 population
Number tested*
Per 1m population
Hospital beds†
Per 1,000 inhabitants
Median age, years‡ 43.7 47.3 42.3 45.7 44.9 40.
Pub/bar/rest. closures N o Ye s Ye s Ye s § Ye s N o
Stockmarkets
Mar 1st-18th, % decrease100,10,1,100BritainSpainSouth KoreaItalyGermanyFrance8,413 35,713 9,043 12,327 13,910 2,
16.3 60.4 13.8 14.9 29.9 3.3 68 33-19.9 -31.2 -29.3 -29.0** -28.1 -22.5,567 2,514 168 24912Stopped
updating
test numbersNot
announced252321191715131197531 28Confirmed cases, selected countries1Days since 100th casehold until April, and the hiatus is likely to
be a lot longer. This summer’s internation-
al Euro 2020 tournament has been put off
until 2021 (as has the Copa América, which
was to take place in Colombia and Argenti-
na). The Glastonbury festival has been can-
celled; so will much of the summer be.
Not all the steps being imposed are well
supported by evidence. Size limits on
smaller gatherings—Austria, which is im-
posing some of the strongest rules, wants
no more than five people together at a
time—are open to question. Anastasia
Pharris of the European Centre for Disease
Prevention and Control, theeu’s public-
health agency, says she knows of no data
supporting specific cut-offs for gathering-
size with regards to covid-19 transmission.
Politicians also seem much keener on
banning international travel than epide-
miologists are. The World Health Organisa-
tion does not recommend broad interna-
tional travel restrictions, or the closure of
borders. But on March 17th theeubanned
non-essential travel into the bloc for 30days (see Europe)—at the same time that
other countries, from India to America,
have banned non-citizens arriving from
the eu. Experts agree cordons sanitaires
around whole regions will make no differ-
ence to the epidemics in individual coun-
tries at this point.
Perhaps the most interesting area of di-
vergence has been school closures. For
continental countries, they were among
the first controls to be put in place, as they
have been worldwide (see International). It
was not until March 18th that first Wales,
then Scotland and finally England said they
would close theirs, too.Be careful of Grandma
How useful this will be will vary from place
to place. School closures make most sense
in societies where old people spend a lot of
time with children and young people and
disrupting those ties is hard. Italy, where
about two-thirds of adults aged 18-35 live
with their parents, and many houses con-
tain three generations, is a case in point. Atthe same time, closing schools means par-
ents have to find someone else to look after
their children or do it themselves. In 2009
researchers at the Brookings Institution,
an American think-tank, estimated that
closing schools and nurseries for a month
would cost America somewhere between
0.1% and 0.3% ofgdp. And if the parent
works in health care, the losses will be
more than financial. The Brookings paper
estimated that between 6% and 19% of
health-care workers would have to stay at
home during a school closure; the English
closures allow for the children of health-
care workers to continue to go to school.
There is also the question of when to in-
troduce such closures. In the Imperial
modelling the closure of schools and uni-
versities has a prompt, if not overwhelm-
ing, effect. But they also have a delayed
cost. This is because of the effect they have
on the second wave of the disease.
Interventions which suppress the re-
production number save a lot of lives. But
they do not make the population immune
to the disease. So if you relax the interven-
tions, thus letting the disease’s reproduc-
tion number rise back up, it will promptly
set about infecting the large pool of people
it missed the first time round.
The model from Imperial showed this
well-known effect in action. After its five
months of restrictions were brought to a
close, a second wave started to build in late
autumn. When the model was run with
schools and universities closed down at
the beginning of the first outbreak, this
second wave was considerably worse, be-
cause immunity built up through infec-
tion-in-the-course-of-education was ab-
sent (see chart 2 on next page).
Concerns about a second wave are one
of the reasons that governments cannot re-
assure citizens over just how long the dis-
ruption to normal life will continue, in-
stead bandying about “the time beings”
and “coming weeks and months”. Few are
as open as the Robert Koch Institute, a Ger-
man government health agency, in saying
that,in extremis, tough restrictions may
need to remain in place until a vaccine can
be made, tested and put into use—a period
it sees as lasting up to two years.
Even if governments were forthright
about how long they expected their impo-
sitions to last, it is not clear that the deci-
sion will be theirs to make. In free societies
the duration will, in practice, depend on
how compliant people are, and for how
long. The team at Imperial reckons that, if
their measures are to show the desired re-
sults, compliance with each of those mea-
sures must be at least 50-75%. In the early
days that may be possible: the chastened
and fined French will not be out in the
same numbers over the coming weekend
as they were over the previous one. And as
hospitals start to fill and then overflow,The EconomistMarch 21st 2020 BriefingThe pandemic 172
1