Second lockdown?America's COVID Spike Shows How a Second Wave Could Bring a Second Lockdown

Published 27 June 2020

So far, we have found only two ways to contain fresh outbreaks.The first, and by far the least costly, is contact-tracing and isolation. It can be done manually without a tracing app, but it requires lightning-fast reactions and extreme efficiency. The second containment method: lockdowns. But lockdowns are destructive for the economy, and they carry with them an exceedingly high cost in personal, social, and medical terms. Juliet Samuel write in The Telegraphthat in the face of a possible second wave, “the stage is set for the great experiment. The top priority must be to get the tracing system working. But even if our Government is somehow incapable of that, it may yet find a set of distancing policies that keeps virus deaths at a low enough level without shutting everything down. Perhaps there is a balance to be struck, involving a mix of mask-wearing, better care-home procedures, loosening rules for the young before the old, keeping people outdoors and planning ways to do so in winter.”