COVID-19: U.K. ResponseFrom Mitigation to Suppression: U.K. Gov Changes Its COVID-19 Response

The British government on Monday, 16 March, announced that it was changing direction in its response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The technical terms for the change in direction: The British government is moving away from “mitigation” toward “suppression.”

The change of course brings the U.K. closer to policies adopted by other countries around the world.

The reason for the government course correction was a report from the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team, which outlined two fundamental strategies in dealing with COVID-19: “mitigation,” which aims not to entirely disrupt transmission to but slow its impact; and “suppression,” which aims to reduce the rate of transmission so that each case generates less than one additional infection, leading to the disease being stopped in its tracks.

Until Monday, the U.K. government’s policy, which it described as the “delay” phase, adopted a weak version of the mitigation policy.

The U.K. government initial approach was summarized last week by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, who said he expected a majority of Britons to contract the virus. He said this would create “herd immunity” in the population, which could prevent the coronavirus from returning with a vengeance next winter.

On Monday, in a joint press conference with Johnson, Vallance did not disown the concept of herd immunity, but he argued this would arise as a byproduct of the pandemic rather than as a consequence of a deliberate strategy. The overriding objective, he said, was still to slow the course of the disease and to protect the vulnerable.

Therese Raphael writes in Bloomberg that the Imperial Team said that with no mitigation measures at all, 80 percent of the population to be infected, resulting in 510,000 deaths in the U.K. and 2.2 million in the U.S. These figures do not take into account those who will die as a result of health systems in both countries getting overwhelmed. By the second week in April, the critical care capacity of Britain’s National Health Service would be overwhelmed.

The Imperial Team said that even with more optimal mitigation measures — self-isolation for anyone with symptoms and their family members for 14 days, longer term isolation for the elderly and vulnerable, and asking the general public to refrain from non-essential travel — peak demand on critical care beds will likely be eight times the capacity of Britain’s medical system. The gap between demand and capacity will be similar in the United States.