A COVID-19 “exit” strategy to end lockdown and reopen the economy | Uri Alon

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How can we return to work without spurring a second surge of coronavirus infection? Biologist Uri Alon shares a thought-provoking strategy: four days at work followed by 10 days of lockdown, a cycle that would exploit a weakness in the virus’s biology and potentially cut its reproductive rate to a manageable level. Learn more about this approach -- which has already been adopted by both companies and countries -- and how it could be a key to reopening the economy responsibly. (This virtual conversation, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and science curator David Biello, was recorded on May 20, 2020.)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Elise Hugh with TED Talks Daily.
0:06.0	So how do we get back to work or school without infecting waves of people?
0:12.7	Biologist Yuri Alon has a strategy he thinks could work, and after watching this talk from TED 2020,
0:18.6	I thought this plan could work really well.
0:22.8	It optimizes for both introverts and extroverts. Yuri Alon talks with the head of TED, Chris Anderson, about this awesome, adaptable idea.
0:32.5	So, the speaker gave a TED Talk at TED Global, I think seven years ago, his name is Professor
0:39.0	Yuri Alon at the Wiseman Institute of Science. Now, he and his colleagues there have come up with
0:46.3	a powerful idea that addresses this key question, how on earth do we get back to work without
0:52.7	creating a second surge of the infection?
0:57.1	Bury Alon, welcome to Ted.
0:59.9	Thank you. It's nice to be here again.
1:03.2	So I guess the key to your idea is this obsession with the reproduction number R0.
1:16.6	If that number is less than one, then fewer than one person is infected by a typical person, and eventually the epidemic fades away.
1:19.6	People are worried that as we come back to work, we'll shoot up above one again.
1:24.6	You have a suggestion for how we might avoid that. What is that
1:29.0	suggestion? Exactly. So we are suggesting a strategy that's based on a weak spot, based on the
1:36.9	biology of the virus, which is a cycle of work and lockdown. It exploits the vulnerability of the virus and then when a person
1:46.4	gets infected, they're not just for about three days. So you don't infect others for the first three
1:52.7	days. And after another two days on average, you get symptoms. So we're proposing a strategy,
1:58.3	which is four days of work and then 10 days of lockdown.
2:02.7	And the next two weeks, again, four days of work, 10 days of lockdown.
2:06.0	And that way, if a person gets infected at work, they reach their peak infectiousness during lockdown.
	...

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