Around the world, cases of coronavirus are beginning
to fall and countries are emerging out of lockdown.
We're opening up our country again.
We need to make progress if we possibly can in relaxing some of the measures.
...as we move progressively towards reopening the economy.
What we're going to do first is gradually reopen the schools.
Let us gradually reopen public and economic life.
But while new infections in many countries are dropping, we aren’t yet out of the woods.
Once we come out of lockdown, cases could start increasing again
and until we have a vaccine that threat won’t ever go away completely.
A second wave of coronavirus could be even worse than the first.
In 1918, Spanish Flu ravaged the globe.
Like Covid-19, little was known about the disease, and there was no vaccine.
The pandemic began in January
and began to taper off around August.
Then an even more deadly second wave
struck across three devastating months
in September, October and November.
But the world has changed a lot in 100 years.
We’re not in the middle of a war and science and epidemiology have come a long way since 1918.
Yet the threat of a second wave still looms large.
When humans are exposed to some infectious diseases, we end up becoming immune.
The more people who are immune against an infection, the slower the disease spreads.
This is called herd immunity.
But we don’t know if people who catch Covid-19 acquire long term immunity.
And even if they do, then at least 60 per cent of the population, or even more,
would need to become infected for herd immunity to work.
This would mean a huge number of deaths.
Sweden is the only country pursuing herd immunity in this way,
opting to keep schools and businesses open rather than lock down the entire country.
The other way of achieving herd immunity is with a vaccine, but this could be years away.
So how do we prevent a second wave?
It all starts with contact tracing. This is the process of tracing all the people who
have been in contact with an infected person, testing them for the infection
and asking them to isolate to prevent spreading the infection further.
Think of it as detective work for public health.
Contact tracing was made popular in 1930 by Dr Thomas Parran,
who aggressively advocated for contact tracing as the only way to defeat syphilis.
But contact tracing isn’t simple.
It requires people remembering everybody they’ve come into contact with since they contracted the infection,
and some people don’t even show symptoms at all.
To make the NHS’s job of contact tracing easier, the government has developed an app.
It means that if you become ill with coronavirus symptoms,
you can self-report your symptoms to the app.
The app then anonymously alerts other app users that someone with symptoms
has been in close proximity to them in the past two weeks.
But at least 60 per cent of the population will need to use the app for it to be effective.
In the meantime, social distancing will likely have to continue.
Social distancing dates way back to the bubonic plague
in the 14th century that killed an estimated 50 million people.
Plague doctors wore masks filled with herbs which they thought would ward off the disease,
and carried long rods to keep infected people away.
While the plague doctors were wrong about the bird masks,
they were right about the need for people to keep a physical distance from each other during the pandemic.
Social distancing will surely change how we work, how we travel and how we socialise with each other.
You will see changes in every sector of society.
At work, shifts might be staggered. Once you clock in, one of your colleagues might clock out.
Schools might send half of their pupils in during the morning and the other half in during the afternoon.
Restaurants will have to reorganise how their tables are laid out.
Tables will be further apart, if there are tables at all.
All of this social distancing is to try and reduce the amount of
close contact we have with each other and in-turn keep cases down.
But there’s one more thing that we might need to do.
In order to stop a second wave, it's possible we’ll have to return to lockdown multiple times.
One study by Imperial College London said that we might need to keep re-entering lockdown
if the number of intensive care admissions gets too high.
And in mid-April, a team of Harvard researchers said that prolonged or intermittent social distancing
might even be necessary until 2022.
For a while, we'll be able to live our lives, open up businesses and try to function as before.
But as we interact with others outside of our household, cases will likely rise again.
So if we want to stop a brutal second wave, we’re going to have to get used to our new normal.