Most crises provoke their fair share of bad ideas, and the Coronavirus pandemic is no exception. Three misconceptions seem to stand out in particular, and I thought I'd try and spell out why these ideas didn't work.
1. Lockdowns need to be 'timed' correctly to have the maximum impact.
This was the go to justification for the delay of implementing social distancing measures in the UK. Superficially, there appeared to be some logic to it. If lockdowns are time limited, it might make sense to ensure they are in operation during the period where the infection curve peaks. The logic is alluring until you realise that when that peak occurs is itself determined by the time a lockdown is started. So far as we can tell from Italy, Spain and China, this is roughly 3 weeks later. This time-lag is independent of the level of spread before the start of a lockdown (assuming, that is, some existing community transmission). The only situation in a delay would reduce the burden on a health system is the one in which it was merely a one-off act designed to mitigate Covid's 'natural' spread to a large majority of the population, in other words where we had given up on actually preventing people from getting the disease.
2. There is a trade-off between suppressing Covid and the economy
This one also sounds pretty intuitive, as social distancing measures obviously reduce economic activity. Indeed, if they didn't, they probably wouldn't be working. People can't go to restaurants, bars, pubs, cinemas, etc. Most can't go to work, and only some of this can effectively be shifted to work done at home. Clearly this is going to cause substantial economic disruption. What's less clear is that the alternative would prevent much of this disruption from occurring anyway. High rates of infection would inevitably mean large numbers of people dropping out (hopefully temporarily) of the workforce, and a large proportion of discretionary spending would likely fall regardless, as people worried about catching Covid going out and feared a loss of income. What lockdowns hope to achieve is limit this period of disruption to a shorter time frame, after which restrictions can hopefully be eased off when accompanied by greater levels of testing. And if you are going to do a lockdown, the earlier the better in economic terms, as this means it can be relaxed at an earlier stage. Moreover, in the long term, covid suppression will likely lead to a swifter recovery, as a larger proportion of the workforce will have been protected and less adjusting will be necessary.
3. Test and trace can only work if we manage to find and isolate every single person infected with coronavirus.
If this were the case, test and trace programs would have a hopeless task. It is simply inconceivable that health care workers could manage to trace and track every single person infected with coronavirus, and a strategy based on that aim would be futile. But this is not what test and trace programs aim to achieve. Rather, they aim to find a large proportion of people who have contracted coronavirus at an early stage and get those people to isolate themselves, thereby reducing the average rate of transmission. If this is reduced to a number below 1, the numbers will exponentially decline regardless of the fact that many people slip through the net. And if average rates infections are kept just a little above 1, increase can be kept sufficiently low to allow for significant periods of relaxation of lockdown rules. What effectively test and trace aims to achieve is to render Covid a less infectious disease.
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