Countries should meet these five criteria before easing lockdowns, study says. Many aren't even close

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Fri, 2020-09-25 10:52 — mike kraft

Study: Five criteria countries should meet before easing lockdowns Countries should not ease coronavirus lockdown restrictions until they meet five criteria -- and many nations are not even close, according to a new analysis published in The Lancet medical journal. Emma Reynolds, CNN CNN

(CNN) Countries should not ease coronavirus lockdown restrictions until they meet five criteria -- and many nations are not even close, according to a new analysis published in The Lancet medical journal.

The research, published Thursday, said that the prerequisites for easing Covid-19 measures are: knowledge of infection status, community engagement, adequate public health capacity, adequate health system capacity and border controls.

The authors looked at nine high-income countries and territories that have started to relax restrictions -- Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, Norway, Spain and the UK. They found that many governments had failed to meet the criteria necessary to avoid new waves of infection, as seen in Spain, Germany and the UK.

"The evidence is clear. If we are getting a resurgence of disease, of numbers of cases, then they opened up too early, it's sort of axiomatic," co-author Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told CNN.

The study also found that an effective find, test, trace, isolate, support system is needed to safely reopen. "No country does it perfectly, actually ... England does it particularly badly. Spain and France don't do terribly well either," said McKee.

The authors of the paper said that countries should base decisions about easing lockdowns on a combination of epidemiology and the social and economic consequences of restrictions....

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