“It won't actually be an eradication or a real reset the way I think people imagine it,” Furness said.īut even a shorter lockdown would ease the pressure on contact tracers and allow them to catch up. It depends on the metric of success - a strict lockdown of 20 days would not wipe out COVID-19.
“But you really need clear messaging for everyone that just said, this is it, we all have to row.
“That would bring us down from a 1,000 a day to maybe two, 300 a day. Some people will contract COVID-19 from their household members maybe one or two days into a lockdown, he explained, so if the circuit breaker only lasted 14 days, those people could still be infectious at the end.Ī lockdown of at least 18 days would be needed to drop cases down effectively, Furness said, adding that he would recommend 20 days for a short lockdown. “It almost looks like a short-term rise and then a fall.”Īccording to Furness, even a short lockdown would have to be longer than two weeks, which is the generally accepted stretch of time needed to self-isolate. “You would continue to have new cases during that time because of prior exposure,” Furness said, adding that infections would also spread within households during the start of the lockdown, creating, potentially, a small boom of cases before the numbers began to drop off. The goal of a shorter circuit breaker lockdown is not an eradication of transmission, but a pause to hopefully allow cases to drop. Even with tightened restrictions, people will still be moving about, and many will still have to work at essential jobs. Of course, this thought experiment doesn’t capture the reality, he added. Since the virus is transmitted directly from person to person, and those with the virus are generally thought to remain infectious for 14 days, theoretically, if no one in the country left their home for two weeks, transmission would simply stop, he said. He told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview that the general idea is “breaking the chain of transmission.” Germany introduced a partial shutdown Monday, and England is set to enter a four week lockdown on Thursday, which will be followed by a tiered system of restrictions.īut how do these smaller lockdowns differ from the measures seen at the start of the pandemic, and is it something Canada should consider?Īccording to Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, the idea has been around longer than terms like “circuit breaker,” which have popped up over the last few weeks. Northern Ireland introduced increased restrictions on Oct. Wales is in the middle of a two-week fire-break, and has had businesses and schools closed since Oct. It’s a strategy several European countries have implemented or are preparing to, as numerous regions battle a rise in cases. “Circuit breaker,” “wave breaker,” “fire-break” - the terms vary, but the concept is similar: a relatively short COVID-19 lockdown with a set end date as opposed to an extended lockdown until cases drop past a certain point.
0 kommentar(er)
