Response strategies: MITIGATION or SUPPRESSION? | Home

Our team’s Arjun Mani brought up an interesting point much worthy of a long debate – would it be better to adopt a “mitigation” strategy that allows us to gradually develop herd immunity for the virus, rather than to adopt the current “suppression” policy response with national lockdowns that are clearly unsustainable in the long run? The debate between “mitigation” and “suppression” that Arjun refers to is highlighted in an Imperial College report on policy responses. 

The report finds that: 

… optimal mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) might reduce peak healthcare demand by 2/3 and deaths by half. However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over. For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option. 

Suppression strategies are the ones that we have currently adopted, essentially closing down schools and restaurants and forcing people to stay at home, and the challenge is that it is unsustainable to last until we find a vaccine. A potentially dangerous outcome is that after we adopt the suppression strategy for two months, followed by warmer temperature in the summer, we will have indeed successfully contained the virus outbreak. However, after factories re-open and economic activities resume, the virus outbreak will be back as well. It will be back just as fiercely and hit us in fall and winter, when the medical system is especially vulnerable and other viruses also fly around. This probable scenario implies that we need to find an alternative to the suppression framework as soon as possible. Quite a brilliant argument. 

I would challenge Arjun’s view, though, because I believe the 2nd outbreak would likely to be much less severe, and the current suppression framework for the 1st wave of outbreak has bought us precious time to reflect on potential policy alternatives and more sustainable mitigation methods for this upcoming winter. The world’s eyes will be on China in the next two months as the country tries to restart its giant economic machinery without causing a 2nd outbreak. If it can successfully do so, it will disperse much of the skepticism and worry that Arjun has brought up. Not that I have much evidence to back my point up, but we’ll see whose prediction is right? 

From the pictures I got from friends in China, the heavy traffic is back on the streets of Beijing, and state media is reporting that over 80% of factories are resuming production activities and such. As the West scrambles to respond to Covid-19, China has somewhat completed the test and handed in the answer keys already. And chances are, it will eventually come out of this exam with a top grade. My prediction is that China will do everything it can to prevent a 2nd outbreak, and while it successfully does so, it will mitigate the “demand shock” from the West through heavy domestic stimulus packages. If it can eventually come out of this crisis in a few months without a 2nd outbreak and with a fully operational domestic economy whose growth will no longer be much reliant on the West, it will send a strong signal – marking validation for China’s political economy system, and hinting at further delineations between China and the West’s paths going forward.