How can we control the coronavirus pandemic?

As the threat of COVID-19 continues, infectious disease expert and TED Fellow Adam Kucharski answers five key questions about the novel coronavirus, providing necessary perspective on its transmission, how governments have responded and what might need to change about our social behavior to end the pandemic. (This video is excerpted from a 70-minute interview between Kucharski and head of TED Chris Anderson. Listen to the full interview at http://go.ted.com/adamkucharski. Recorded March 11, 2020)

[How can we control
the coronavirus pandemic?]

[From infectious disease expert
Adam Kucharski]

[Question 1: What does containment mean
when it comes to outbreaks?]

Containment is this idea
that you can focus your effort on control

very much on the cases and their contacts.

So you're not causing disruption
to the wider population,

you have a case that comes in,
you isolate them,

you work out who they've come
into contact with,

who's potentially these
opportunities for exposure

and then you can follow up those people,

maybe quarantine them, to make sure
that no further transmission happens.

So it's a very focused, targeted method,

and for SARS, it worked remarkably well.

But I think for this infection,

because some cases are going to be missed,
or undetected,

you've really got to be capturing
a large chunk of people at risk.

If a few slip through the net,

potentially, you're going
to get an outbreak.

[Question 2: If containment
isn't enough, what comes next?]

In that respect,

it would be about massive changes
in our social interactions.

And so that would require,

of the opportunities
that could spread the virus

so these kind of close contacts,

everybody in the population, on average,

will be needing to reduce
those interactions

potentially by two-thirds
to bring it under control.

That might be through working from home,

from changing lifestyle

and kind of where you go
in crowded places and dinners.

And of course, these measures,
things like school closures,

and other things
that just attempt to reduce

the social mixing of a population.

[Question 3: What are the risks
that we need people to think about?]

It's not just whose hand you shake,

it's whose hand that person
goes on to shake.

And I think we need to think
about these second-degree steps,

that you might think you have low risk

and you're in a younger group,

but you're often going to be
a very short step away

from someone who is going to get hit
very hard by this.

And I think we really need
to be socially minded

and think this could be quite dramatic
in terms of change of behavior,

but it needs to be

to reduce the impact
that we're potentially facing.

[Question 4: How far apart
should people stay from each other?]

I think it's hard to pin down exactly,

but I think one thing to bear in mind
is that there's not so much evidence

that this is a kind of aerosol
and it goes really far --

it's reasonably short distances.

I don't think it's the case

that you're sitting a few meters
away from someone

and the virus is somehow
going to get across.

It's in closer interactions,

and it's why we're seeing
so many transmission events

occur in things like meals
and really tight-knit groups.

Because if you imagine

that's where you can get
a virus out and onto surfaces

and onto hands and onto faces,

and it's really situations like that
we've got to think more about.

[Question 5: What kind
of protective measures

should countries put in place?]

I think that's what people
are trying to piece together,

first in terms of what works.

It's only really in the last
sort of few weeks

we've got a sense that this thing
can be controllable

with this extent of interventions,

but of course, not all countries
can do what China have done,

some of these measures

incur a huge social, economic,
psychological burden

on populations.

And of course, there's the time limit.

In China, they've had them in
for six weeks,

it's tough to maintain that,

so we need to think of these tradeoffs

of all the things we can ask people to do,

what's going to have the most impact
on actually reducing the burden.

[To learn more, visit: Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention]

[World Health Organization]