Suppression or Mitigation? The Language of Coronavirus Containment

On March 16, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the nation needed to take stronger actions to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Last week we asked everyone to stay at home if you had one of two key symptoms: a high temperature or a new and continuous cough.

Today, we need to go further, because according to SAGE [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] it looks as though we’re now approaching the fast growth part of the upward curve.

And without drastic action, cases could double every 5 or 6 days.

"The low-key British response was driven by a controversial theory embraced by the U.K. government’s top scientists: that the best way to ease the long-term consequences of the coronavirus pandemic was to allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up the population’s herd immunity," wrote Owen Matthews for Foreign Policy.

On Monday [March 16] night, that theory collided with the facts. A new analysis by immunologists at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine of the impact of the coronavirus in Italy suggested that up to 30 percent of patients hospitalized with the virus would require intensive care treatment. Those numbers, if repeated in the U.K., would quickly overwhelm Britain’s state-run National Health Service. 

Exactly one week later, the prime minister announced the nation was going into a "virtual lockdown." On Friday, it was reported that Johnson had become the world's first head-of-state to test positive for COVID-19, along with British Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

510,000 fatalities in the U.K; 2.2 million in the U.S.

Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, London-based reporters for The New York Times, write about the significance of the analysis (source article). "It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were, as who reported them: Imperial College London."

Imperial College has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu. With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.

The report [pdf] outlines two fundamental strategies to contain the virus:

• Mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread—reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection.
• Suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely. Each policy has major challenges. 

Additional media reports on the Imperial College London analysis can be found in The Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters.

COVID-19 update, March 27: Total cases: 597,335, with the U.S. reporting the most, 104,686. Total Deaths: 27,365, led by Italy, Spain, and China.

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Hat tip to SDGreg.