around the world people are beginning to contemplate a life after lockdown china appeared to have passed the work of spain is returning to work germany is due to end social distancing measures in a week's time and governments are grappling with what to do next with no way to eradicate covert 19 and the ever-present risk of a resurgence what's the right way to leave lock down placing more than a third of the world's population into lockdown has done much to slow the spread of the new coronavirus but there's a big price to pay the problem is that it's incredibly damaging to the economy and that has real consequences for people's lives the lockdown is really just a very intense form of social distancing and you want to relax that as much as possible so you want to work out which elements of the social distancing have most effect on the disease but the least effect on the way people leave their lives the trouble is no one is certain what the right formula is so governments will need to strike a delicate balance and take a very cautious approach to which measures they loosen how and when take for example the tricky question of getting children back to school countries like Denmark and Germany have looked at the European schools although under very strict conditions which means you have a sort of social distancing within the classroom good luck with that as with other social distancing measures making the wrong call on this could lead to a resurgence of the disease but given the broad impact of school closures on children and their parents and that young children in particular may not be as vulnerable to the effects of covert 19 there is a case for trying to reopen schools sooner rather than later China has already pioneered the use of social distancing measures within schools to enable them to reopen so far the country has avoided a second wave of infection which is why there may be other lessons to learn from China's staggered return to daily life from capping the number of people allowed in restaurants and public places to severely limiting the number of workers that firms can have on site each day social distancing isn't a binary phenomenon the way to think of it as a series of measures each of which does a little bit to reduce the spread of the disease at a particular inconvenience or cost of society an element of trial and error is inevitable which means governments will need to be prepared to tighten the rules again if new infections start to mount a second element which helps you with all of that is testing and contact tracing to detect people who have a disease identify all the people they have been in touch with contact then test them put them in isolation if any of them are infectious then you contact the people that they are in touch with tracking the virus in this way is an essential strategy if countries are to become less dependent on social distancing you can concentrate all I have had on the people who are most likely to have the disease a corollary of that is the people who you don't have to contact are freer to move around and they otherwise would be it's a huge task but technology may be able to offer a shortcut Apple Google are teaming up to work on technology to help reduce the spread of corona virus to help deliver contact tracing to Americans and people around the world the idea is that when Apple and Android phones can work together and be in touch with each other leave if someone's infected you can go back over the log that shows you all the people they've been in touch with and identify very very rapidly you know who the contacts have been and then direct your testing to them Germany Ireland and America are among the countries now building infection tracking apps that could run on Apple and Google's new protocol governments could use these apps to create a form of covert 19 passport classifying individuals by whether they tested positive or not that's a system that you've had used pretty thoroughly in China such that people have to show their phone and show they've got a green status which means they can travel around but to feel the benefits of this innovative approach governments are going to have to really invest it doesn't work unless you also have an army of testers to go around and follow up these leads test all the people ensure that they're keeping their quarantine research suggests that America alone would need to employ another 100, 000 contact tracers at a cost of around 3.
6 billion dollars the other thing is you need the physical tests you need the reagents you need all the materials and you need them manufactured on an immense scale without this further lockdowns could become inevitable the less good your testing and the less good your contact tracing the more general and harmful actually the lockdown has to be in order to create the same effect you have a big broad net to catch the same number of infectious people a third element is to make your health system more robust when health systems get swamped then the number of deaths really goes up fast so you can invest now in equipping medics with all the protection they need having enough ventilators having enough ICU beds which means that if the disease does start to pick up the consequences are less bad of course there's the ultimate way to return to daily life scientists in Oxford are hoping to have a million doses of a corona virus vaccine by September 3 vaccines are already in clinical trials – in the United States one in China there are many vaccine candidates in development in the year or more it may take to deliver an effective vaccine government should be preparing for the next challenge producing it finding the vaccine is one thing but then you have to manufacture it at scale and that would be really quite hard part of the answer is to start building manufacturing plants now at a cost of billions of dollars before an effective vaccine has been found without this investment there will be a shortage of manufacturing capacity and as long as there's a shortage some countries are likely to push to the front of the queue there's a danger that different countries try and corner the market for their own citizens which is understandable but not very good for the world because it means that vulnerable populations and really key workers like health care workers who need protection or to care for everybody else they will go short locating manufacturing plants across the world could help counter this vaccine nationalism and ensure the vaccine reaches those most in need long before there's any vaccine to be distributed governments have more pressing calls to make on the right way to leave lockdown with few certainties to guide them they'll need to be nimble versatile and have vast reserves of patience for a return to everyday life there will be anything but business as usual hi I'm a trick car The Economist deputy editor it's amazing in just how a few short months the coronavirus story has come to dominate everything we do so we'd like to see more of our coverage please click on the link opposite thank you for watching [Music].
