World leaders must act so coronavirus won’t ‘overwhelm the systems,’ epidemiologist says

Marcel Salathé: I don’t think she’s alarmist. I mean, it’s great actually to see a world leader step up and start to work with actual numbers. We know that this is a fairly contagious virus. And so this thing will infect a large part of the population if we don’t stop it. And the most important thing is to realize that we can still get this more or less under control. Whether we can fully stop it, that’s sort of an open question, but at least we can try to flatten the curve. 

They would strongly suggest to all leaders of the world to take a page out of the playbook that we’ve seen in Asia. There, many leaders have been very clear about this. The Singaporean leadership, for example, has been very clear, has been focused on the science, has been communicating very transparently from early on. And that is incredibly important because, for these social distancing measures that we now need to implement, you really need the buy-in from the population. And the best way to do that is to be clear, to be based on the facts and to be transparent about it. 

The trajectory that we know from early data is that in the absence of any measures, you should see this thing grow and potentially double every week. And so one does not need to be a mathematician to understand that if we let this thing grow at this pace, it will quickly overwhelm the systems. 

Well, I think the most important thing is to start and take this as serious as it actually is. I’ve been a bit puzzled by the relatively slow response, particularly in Europe and, of course, also the US. I would just like to remind everyone also, for example, of the Italian situation. I mean, just three weeks ago, this thing was essentially nowhere. And now this system is completely overwhelmed, and we hear very tragic stories. 

Yeah. People say, “Oh, you know, the Italian population, a lot of old people. And, you know, maybe the hospitals are not so good.” Admittedly, there are a lot of old people. That’s, of course, a reflection that the health care system is actually very good. And I also like to remind people that this is happening in the north of Italy — so, the north of Italy is a very wealthy place. And these are excellent hospitals. And to see these hospitals all of a sudden being completely overwhelmed within two weeks, I mean, that should give everyone pause. 

I think it’s not a good time now for criticism. I think there’s a couple of countries in Asia that have managed to deal with the situation. South Korea is another one. And so I think we should just learn whatever we can. Obviously, it’s understandable that nations in the West, nations and countries in Europe, the US, may not be able  — and may also not want — to take the exact same measures or do it in the exact same way. From a viral perspective, that’s really not important here. What’s important is that something gets done and that can be done in the context of your situation. But it’s definitely not the time to now ask, “Can we do what the Chinese or the South Koreans did?” We just need to see: What have they done? Why did this work? And what can we do now to make sure we also get that under control? Because in a couple of weeks, this will be too late, and this will be a completely academic discussion.