How do we come out of the lockdown?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2020
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As some nations begin to tentatively lift their lockdowns, Tanya Beckett asks how best this can be done. What lessons, if any, can we learn from past pandemics? How do states make the decision, juggling the increasing demands of economic and social factors against public health concerns, amid worries of a new wave of infections from the disease? And what will our lives look like in a post-lockdown world? We hear from contributors based in France, the United States, South Korea and Denmark - one of the first countries to begin to lift its lockdown.
Reporter Tanya Beckett Producer Jim Frank
Image: A woman wearing a mask runs through a deserted Central Park in Manhattan, April 16, 2020 during lockdown in New York City, USA (Credit: Johannes Eisele/ Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the inquiry on the BBC World Service. I'm Tanya Beckett. |
| 0:04.7 | Each week one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. |
| 0:18.3 | On the 9th of April the people of Wuhan City and Hube province in China started to emerge blinking into the outside world. The Hube Coronovirus Prevention and Control |
| 0:25.6 | Department had just lifted a 76-day lockdown to halt the spread of the |
| 0:31.3 | disease. |
| 0:32.8 | On the very same day, reports emerged that another Chinese city, |
| 0:37.2 | this time on the Russian border, was hurriedly building |
| 0:40.6 | a makeshift hospital. Residents were being told to stay indoors and the border with Russia was closed. |
| 0:48.0 | Over the last couple of months, a third of the world's population has been subject to government imposed restrictions in a |
| 0:55.2 | bid to stop the spread of coronavirus. In this week's inquiry we're asking how do we |
| 1:01.5 | come out of lockdown. |
| 1:03.4 | Part 1, Eyes and Ears from the Past. |
| 1:09.5 | The flu pandemic of 1918 was the most deadly global disease outbreak the world has ever known. |
| 1:17.0 | It claimed the lives of about a tenth of the people it infected. |
| 1:21.0 | Its victims were young, old and very often in between. |
| 1:26.0 | Striking as it did at the end of World War I, the spread of the Spanish flu, as it was called, was aided by the massive movement of troops |
| 1:35.6 | around the world. |
| 1:37.4 | It erupted in three waves, and by the time it had ended its deadly global march, about one-third of the planet's population |
| 1:46.1 | had been infected. |
| 1:48.0 | The 1918 pandemic has often been cited as the closest comparison we have to the health crisis we are now facing |
| 1:56.3 | with coronavirus. |
| 1:57.3 | Okay, I'm John Barry, I'm a writer, also a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. |
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