There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Strategy (But Let’s Start With Best Case)

Let’s take a step back from the drumbeat that we must reopen economies as quickly as possible. The World Health Organization is cautioning against the immunity passport idea that is so popular with some governments such as the UK. There are more reasons not to rely on that than news reports mention. What really makes sense for an exit from lockdown?

Friends, family, colleagues and I have been discussing this. What I say in my posts is only my personal opinion, except where I quote someone (with attribution). I am not an expert in pandemics or medicine. Neither are most of the talking heads trying to convince us that they have the answer. I am a person who has been trained to find facts in the noise and think things through. Here are some of my thoughts. I’ll break them up into posts of digestible size.

Today we’ll start with the best case scenario. Unfortunately most of the world is facing less desirable situations, which we’ll get to in subsequent posts.

First, there is no one-size-fits-all exit strategy. Countries that executed their pandemic response plans exceptionally well are in a position to release more restrictions than countries that didn’t.

This has everything to do with science and not so much to do with politics, except that it requires superb political leadership.

As examples, New Zealand and Australia are led by a progressive and a conservative prime minister, respectively. Both countries were quick and decisive in responding to the arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They took full advantage of being island nations to help them close their borders while they fought the virus.

They dealt with the classic pandemic playbook seriously: Lockdown at the earliest sign of trouble, aggressive finding of infected people, contact tracing, quarantine and containment.

They have had few cases of COVID-19 and very few deaths from it. They aimed to starve the virus of hosts and thereby eliminate it from their populations. They are close to success. The notion of ‘immunity passports’ would make no sense for them. Few people there got exposed to the virus at all and it is not actively circulating in the population. They can contemplate going back to nearly ‘normal’ activities.

The caveat is that they must be extremely vigilant. They must spot any new cases quickly, quarantine and treat new patients, trace the patients’ contacts, and quarantine those contacts too. They also must find new ways to interact with the world so that incoming traffic does not bring the virus in again. Tourism has been important to both countries, especially New Zealand, so that will not be easy, but it is necessary.

That’s the best case. It requires either an economy that is or can quickly become nearly self-sufficient, or an economy that can readily convert its interactions with the rest of the world for imports, exports and cross-border travel so that potential re-seeding of the virus within the nation is almost entirely blocked and is caught quickly whenever it sneaks through.

Most of the world is not in such an enviable situation. We’ll get to the next level down during the next post in this series.