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In his eleventh coronavirus update, Oliver Lamb explores how governments across the globe are relaxing lockdown measures, albeit with caution. While schools in South Korea have mostly resumed lessons, having suffered a relatively low death toll, South Africa is still facing thousands of new cases a day. This article also discusses the implementation of new tracking schemes, which aim to isolate smaller outbreaks of disease.
As students passed through the school gates on Wednesday the 20th of May, their temperatures were taken and hand sanitiser was dolloped into their palms. Inside, transparent plastic partitions separated their desks and canteen seats. They and their teachers wore masks. This was not school as it was pre-coronavirus, but it was better than the months of online teaching South Korea’s students had just endured.
Just over a week later, however, 251 schools in Bucheon, west of the capital Seoul, had to close again. The closures were triggered by a spike in cases on Thursday 28 May – 79 new infections were confirmed, the highest daily number since early April. Most of them were linked to a distribution centre in Bucheon.
South Korea still has one of the lowest case counts in the world, having acted quickly and effectively to contain the virus. But globally, the spread of the pandemic accelerates every week. At the start of Saturday 23 May worldwide confirmed cases stood at 5,298,000 with 339,000 registered deaths. Seven days later those numbers had risen to 6,026,000 and 366,000. Deaths are slowing, but this may be because the worst-hit areas are now those with the least capacity to record them.*
The places that are over the worst – of the first wave at least – are in the process of easing their lockdowns. Further progress on that front was made this week, as cinemas, theatres and exhibitions partly opened in Spain, Greece opened cafés and restaurants, and Saudi Arabia loosened its curfew times. But the virus is still present. These countries and others like them may soon find themselves dealing with sporadic localised flare-ups like the one in Bucheon. To prevent these from developing into larger outbreaks, governments must be on standby to reimpose lockdowns on a local level – a strategy that the British prime minister Boris Johnson calls “whack-a-mole”.
Thus, when 107 cases of coronavirus were directly or indirectly linked to a church service that took place in Frankfurt on 10 May, German authorities immediately began to track down all the attendees. The same day – last Sunday – the Mponeng mine in South Africa was closed after 164 workers tested positive, all of whom were quarantined. Meanwhile, a cluster of cases appeared over the course of this week in the Japanese city of Kitakyushu, just days after the country lifted its state of emergency.
The anomaly out of those three examples is South Africa. Its early lockdown flattened the curve, but economic woes and rioting soon began to bite and restrictions are being eased. Cases are now rising rapidly. The country has 29,000 confirmed infections, the highest in Africa, and 1800 were recorded on Friday alone. Similarly, economic calamity has forced India to ease its early-imposed lockdown, but the country registered a record 8000 new cases on Friday to bring its total to 173,000. (Increased testing partially, but not entirely, accounts for this).*
For now, though, the United States still has by far the highest absolute number of cases and deaths. On Tuesday, the confirmed death toll passed 100,000. That was almost three times the second-highest toll, the UK’s, which reached 37,000 on the same day.* However, as a proportion of its population, the US has got off lightly compared to hard-hit European countries like Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy. That may change in the coming weeks as more and more states ease their lockdowns; over the Memorial Day weekend, hundreds of Americans gathered at beaches and beside pools. A recent study found that only nine states were conducting or even near to conducting the minimum recommended level of testing needed to contain local outbreaks like those in Bucheon, Frankfurt, Mponeng and Kitakyushu.
*statistics taken from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus
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