What can Britain learn about containing Covid-19 from countries that got it right? | Philip Ball
Are we doing Covid-19 right? With the number of new reported cases of infection declining rapidly in China, but soaring in what is now a semi-locked-down Italy, it's worth looking at the experiences and strategies of countries to see what can be learned. Governments are faced with stark choices, says Roy Anderson of Imperial College in London, one of the UK's most eminent epidemiologists. There are essentially four options. You could try to minimise the number of fatalities or the economic impact. You could attempt to flatten the peaked curve in the incidence so that the cases are not all concentrated in a narrow time span, which could overwhelm healthcare resources (already severely stretched in the UK). Or you could try to delay the spread in order to buy time for development of a vaccine - although most experts don't expect one to be available for at least a year.
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