From China to Germany, the World Learns to Live With the Coronavirus

Health officials in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are largely responsible for their own strategies. In England, where local officials have complained about a lack of testing data from the central government, employers or building managers have picked up the slack by keeping track of infections and respond to outbreaks. Some, like the headquarters of a major retailer in East Lancashire, have been praised by public health officials for taking quick action.

But controlling the virus would require an understanding of where it is lurking, especially difficult for a disease in which 80 percent of the cases have mild symptoms. Several local public health directors said in interviews that they learned about outbreaks from the news. The level of detail that officials need to decide on localized shutdowns — the postal codes of people testing positive, for example — remains elusive.

“Every pandemic begins as a local outbreak,” said Lincoln Sargeant, the director of public health in North Yorkshire. “It’s granular intelligence that we need in a timely fashion.”

Mr. Johnson, the prime minister, has maintained that local shutdowns are sufficient to control new waves of the virus. In the beginning, the government “had very few instruments at our disposal,” he said on Friday. Now, he said, officials can “identify outbreaks where they happen.”

He has likened the effort to Whac-A-Mole, the decades-old arcade game. Officials can “take the preventive measures necessary on the spot, rather than going back to the national lockdown approach,” he said. “That’s what we hope.”

In Rome, the outbreak at the San Raffaele Pisana Institute tested the ability of the local authorities to find and stop outbreaks.

Local health officials tested patients and staff at the hospital, emptied three wards and sealed off the building. Former patients and their contacts queued in their cars outside drive-in testing stations. Rome’s prosecutors opened an investigation into clusters’ origin.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/world/europe/countries-reopening-coronavirus.html