U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of the hospital—after getting round-the-clock attention from two nurses that was unlikely to be matched by the average patient. The nation’s chief medical officer has indicated that new cases of COVID-19 in the U.K. may have passed their peak. And in the city of London, as on Wall Street, the money men are agitating for a fast return to normal … even if it means losing a few peasants. All of that sounds like a recipe for some very bad decisions.
But rather than cranking up the reopen engine, the U.K. government on Thursday proved to be conservative in the other sense … the sense of being cautious. In addition to extending the nationwide lockdown for at least three additional weeks, Foreign Minister Dominic Raab, who is standing in for Johnson while the prime minister recovers, provided something that the United States is sorely lacking—a set of goals that need to be achieved before anyone talks about relaxing social distancing.
As BBC News reports, Raab admitted that even if the number of cases in the U.K. seems to be slowing the numbers are not down to where they need to be before relaxing suppression measures can be considered. On Wednesday, the U.K. confirmed another 4,600 cases of COVID-19 and recorded another 861 deaths attributed to the disease. That brought the total number of deaths in the country to more than 13,000, putting the U.K. in the top five for most coronavirus deaths.
Going forward, the U.K. will reevaluate rules every three weeks, check what is working, relax those rules that don’t seem to make a difference, and also look at adding additional restrictions where needed. Before the government considers any sort of broad relaxation of the regulations set in place to safeguard against COVID-19, it wants to see five things:
- Assurance that the number of new cases, and the demand for medical resources, is within the capacity of the national health system and that all areas are able to meet critical care needs.
- Demonstrate that any decline in numbers is not just an aberration in reporting statistics, but a “sustained and consistent” decline in the number of deaths recorded daily.
- Broad and reliable testing data from across the country that shows a declining number of new cases in all regions.
- Confidence that both testing and protective gear is available in quantity to meet any possible new wave of disease.
- A strong consensus that the changes being made don’t risk generating a new round of infections, and a willingness to roll back those changes if testing or healthcare systems raise an alarm.
This seems like something that the United States hasn’t seen outside of Elizabeth Warren’s website—a plan. This is not an extensive list. It’s far from too much to ask.
Before any change is made to relax social distancing, in any country, it should be clear that the storm really has passed, that the system is ready to fend off a second wave, and that the testing is in place to raise a red flag if a mistake is made.
Maybe Raab came up with this on his own. Maybe Johnson had something of an epiphany while in the ICU. In any case, the United States could do a lot worse than to follow the U.K.’s lead on this point.