National leaders should plan to end lockdowns in certain areas, provided they have widespread coronavirus testing and “very sophisticated surveillance” capabilities to watch for new outbreaks, according to the World Health Organization.
“If you know what’s happening in every town, if you know what’s happening in every municipality, in every county, in every province, you can then begin to adapt your measures for the situation in that particular area,” WHO Health Emergencies Program Executive Director Michael Ryan told reporters Friday.
The WHO official offered that analysis one day after President Trump told state governors that he would like them to end the lockdowns that have proliferated in recent weeks as coronavirus cases surged in the United States.
Ryan emphasized that officials can take such a step only if they have a clear understanding of where the virus is spreading.
“If you know who has the virus, if you know who the contacts are, you can break that chain,” Ryan said. “And in order to do that, and in order to transition from the current measures that are in place, countries simply have to have in place a system to detect, isolate, contact-trace, and quarantine, as well as to continue appropriate hygiene and physical distancing measures.”
The question of when to ease the lockdowns that have paralyzed much of the U.S. economy in recent weeks has proven controversial in recent weeks, but Ryan noted that additional data will make it easier to harmonize public health and economic policy.
“All of us want to see the measures that we’re using for public health at the community level to be adapted to the maximum control of the disease but to the minimum impact on the economy and social life,” he said.
The administration’s early response was plagued by a lack of coronavirus tests, but Vice President Mike Pence announced Thursday that more than 550,000 have been tested for the novel coronavirus. That enhanced testing is opening the door for “a laser-focused approached rather than a generic horizontal approach,” according to coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx.
“This is what we’re talking about: how to do surveillance, how to do contact tracing, and how to do each of these items to make sure that you prevent that spread,” Birx told reporters at the White House. Ryan agreed that policymakers need to “evolve from measures that have been designed to suppress” the virus into more “targeted” tactics “that will allow us at the very least to live with this virus until we can develop a vaccine to get rid of it.”
Yet, officials who conclude they can ease the lockdowns need to remain watchful for a resurgence of the coronavirus outbreak.
“They must be in a position to reimplement measures should the situation deteriorate,” the WHO official said. “That takes a very sophisticated surveillance system. It takes a very strong health system to absorb the surge of cases in any particular area.”
