Thirteen cities, containing more than 60 million people have been locked down. Yet the country’s quarantine is unprecedented. “We can't be sure, but this is the best data we have, and it's nice to see other data from other countries corroborate the Chinese data.” While some are questioning the validity of the numbers coming out of China, says Isaac Bogoch, associate professor in Infectious Diseases at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, the theory appears to be working in practice: lockdown has been a success. The stats suggest that China’s actions have achieved this. Read more: The problem with using herd immunity to fight coronavirus “Lombardy in Italy was one of the wealthiest regions of Europe – very well equipped, with excellent human resources and healthcare, and they struggled a lot, because there was a surge in cases,” says Antoine Flahault, head of the population epidemiology unit at Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland. Whatever measures are brought in, they share one aim – stemming the tide of sick people visiting health services. “When we see cases jump suddenly – for example as we've seen that in the US recently – that reflects a testing capacity issue, rather than being a true reflection of the epidemic itself,” explains Caroline Buckee, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. This rate fluctuates with factors like population density, contact between age groups, and, in the case of deriving accurate numbers, how many people are being tested. And prime minister Boris Johnson announced last night that the NHS will no longer test those self isolating at home, and that the country will avoid lockdowns.Įpidemics grow for a simple reason – how often people mix. It has been hesitant to deploy the four social distancing measures available to it – school closures, limitation of movement, restrictions of mass gatherings and quarantine.

The UK, which now has 590 cases, will take a different path to the rest of the world. Israel is quarantining all arrivals from abroad for 14 days. India has effectively closed its borders to all foreign visitors. The United States has banned flights from most of Europe. Belgium, France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, amongst others, have closed all their schools. Governments, desperate to manage the flow of patients into health services, have employed wildly different measures. The coronavirus, first reported from Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019, has spread to more than 80 countries.

One case total lockdown world