#1 Situation

“No country will be safe until all are safe.” Josep Borrell

In 4 weeks, the overall number of cases increased tenfold. The situation in France is evolving favorably, with a slight decrease in deaths. Given the incubation times and the time it takes for the disease to develop, this is normal, but there is still a long way to go.

We know more about our enemy, but the prospects remain the same, the probability of having a vaccine in a year’s time is almost nil, in two years’ time very low. As an indication, we have a first vaccine trial for SARS (2002/2003) which started this week, for HIV we are still waiting.

#2 Proponents of a new Holocaust, more or less socially acceptable

We continue to have two main opposing theses.

Those who defend the inevitability of the virus and who, having given up before starting, defend the idea that we will be forced to live with it. They aim more or less implicitly at “herd immunity” and defend an extreme vision of the law of the strongest.

Those who defend the idea that the only thing that matters is to stop the tide in order to preserve the medical system, so that those who must die do so in acceptable conditions^[i]. But behind the statistical projections, which are only as good as the assumptions behind them, lies the idea that while waiting for a hypothetical vaccine, we will have to face repeated spikes until group immunity is reached.

Let us be clear, to expect 1% deaths among 60% of the affected population is to expect 4 million deaths in Europe and 60 million deaths worldwide^[ii]. Knowing that the acquired immunity of those who have been infected by other members of the CoronaVirus family is one to two years, plan to start again often before the hypothetical vaccine.

The solution of preserving the health care system by adjusting the crises to the treatment capacity of hospitals, in order to make a large number of millions of deaths more acceptable, is akin to the solution of preserving racial purity by adjusting the pace of convoys to the capacity of ovens, in order to make a large number of millions of deaths more acceptable.

If it is the black, the poor, the weakest and the unproductive elderly who suffer most from the pandemic, there are contemporary eugenists who find this quite satisfactory in the end. On this level, the ultra-reactionaries and ultra-libertarians meet.

It is an absolute scientific and moral rout.

Agreeing to settle in a world that is content to coexist with COVID-19 is to give arguments to legitimize the end of public freedoms and the advent of a police state with modern means of control and rights à la carte according to the population.

It is to legitimize the end of the liberal economy and the nightmare of the monopoly of Amazon, Alibaba and Uber combined with the universal hold of more or less well-intentioned GAFAs. 

It is to legitimize the end of the “commons”, starting with the common and public space, and the return of everyone to their private space and their inequalities, in a word, it is to legitimize the end of politics and social life, for lack of space to make them exist, and the beginning of a uberized and ultra-secure world. 

The world of COVID-19 is not made to last and should not last^[iii] – which does not mean that the world after COVID-19 will have to look like the world before, we will also have to learn from our mistakes. 

#3 The collective struggle has not yet begun.

There is no choice between economy or health or morality or efficiency, there is an absolute necessity to choose all at once. If the Titanic sinks, the passengers locked in their comfortable first class cabin will sink with the others.

Fortunately, there is a third way, that of the proponents of eradication, which we called for four weeks ago, but apart from China and New Zealand, few countries are making it loud and clear as their policy.

Calls for international cooperation are coming from all sides, and voices are joining us in calling for the same level of cooperation that led to the eradication of smallpox, even if it has to be done within a shorter timeframe.

This is not yet the time to clamor for victory. And those who consider that the peak, or plateau, has been reached and think that it is time to think about de-confinement have more in mind to make people forget their wait-and-see attitude in the face of the growing crisis. They are easily recognizable, they had nothing to propose before, they have nothing to propose today. But they are ready to say that it will be thanks to them.

The fight will really have begun when a global eradication policy is implemented. It will be over when the last country has lifted its protective measures.

The speed with which we coordinate, and the means we give each other, will depend on when we can clamor victory and de-confinement.

#4 This is no time for recriminations

No country has a magic solution. 

Coordination among actors and coherence of strategy are essential. The comparison between Veneto and Lombardy is enlightening: ten times more deaths in Lombardy^[iv]. In the Veneto, a coherent strategy has paid off.

China almost succeeded, but at what cost. In South Korea, testing and tracing alone has not yet succeeded. It only took a couple from the UK to revive the pandemic in Vietnam. One unconscious lady, knowing herself to be ill, to spread the virus in Uruguay. The evangelical gathering in Mulhouse (FR) could just as easily have been held 10 km upstream in Basel (CH) as it was 10 km across the Rhine in Freiburg (DE).

And those who fare better owe it more to an insular situation (South Korea, New Zealand…), or to the disobedience of their people who were quicker than their leaders to implement barrier measures like the inhabitants of Hong Kong who braved the liberticidal laws on the prohibition of the wearing of masks^[v].

To win, we must use all the tools available simultaneously and learn from each other’s experiences as quickly as possible^[vi].

#5 Methodology

We are not going to repeat the entire contents of the previous paper. But we insist, it must be confinement and compartmentalization. Compartmentalization in space, compartmentalization in time.

There are those who advocate compartmentalization based on immunity. In the absence of tests on a very large scale, very cheap, and very reliable (≈99%) it remains risky. Moreover, this could lead to the implementation of “internal passports”, which are more dangerous in terms of freedom than any imaginable tracing tool.

Compartmentalization by zone is essential: reduce the economic impact, show positive results as and when they occur, and free up resources for other zones.

When some country’s overall “viral load”^[vii] has fallen, it will then be necessary to test-and-trace^[viii] the remaining cases in order to prevent the reappearance of isolated cases due to incubation periods.

The basic equation, as far as we know^[ix], is that one person in four is asymptomatic and the incubation period is 5 days. So we have a 1 in 16 chance of one case appearing after 10 days modulo the rate of infection. If no precautions are taken, we have to multiply by 2 squared. That’s a one in four chance. But by respecting the barrier gestures and other protective measures (tracing, tests, etc.), we can divide by 10 squared. That is one chance out of 1600. It is the cumulative effect of all the measures that makes eradication possible and rapid.

Test-and-trace will only be effective at the end of the fight^[x].

Wearing a scarf is a barrier gesture to be added.

#6 Other provisions

The closure of international air traffic must be immediate and total (see Annex), but borders must be closed AND international cooperation intensified. 

Otherwise, imported cases will come back again and again to erase all efforts. This is of course accompanied by quarantine measures at points of entry for all passengers (wherever they come from, and without discrimination against nationals or others); and equivalent measures for other forms of transport.

A global control committee must be set up. This committee could be supported by the G7 group of academies, or the extended group of 15 academies. This will ensure that it will have at its disposal illico an already existing network of trust that does not have to deal with the crisis on a daily basis. This network will be able to identify the individuals and institutions with the resources needed for any task at hand, and finally it will be able to interface with the outside world, both with those who govern and those who are governed.

^[i] Cf Neil Ferguson’s papers in London, or those at Harvard.

^[ii] And if one were to put a figure on the cost of a human life, with as little regard for the human being as these projections suggest, say a million euros for a European, the cost would be 4,000 billion euros (per year?) for the EU.

^[iii] It is exactly the same risk as that of a world in perpetual struggle against terrorism. The suspension of freedoms after September 11th 2001 still exposes us to that risk. We are still not out of this state of emergency and some states – the United States in particular – are in no hurry to get out of it. See Grégoire Chamayou’s excellent book, La théorie du drône, on this subject.

^[iv] See Roberto Saviano’s column in Le Monde of 12 April 2020: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2020/04/12/roberto-saviano-la-faiblesse-c-est-de-se-croire-invincible_6036361_3232.html

^[v] Wearing a scarf (to distinguish it from a mask, medical instrument) or a veil does not protect the wearer from contamination (it does not aggravate either, on the contrary); on the other hand, it significantly limits its capacity to infect others, probably by an order of magnitude (x10). This is essential in the face of a virus with a fairly long incubation period, and with a high proportion of asymptomatic individuals.

^[vi] See article in the Lancet of April 8th, 2020 for a first analysis of feedback from China. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30746-7 and for Île-de-France, the report by Vittoria Colizza : Report #9 April 12 2020 https://www.epicx-lab.com/uploads/9/6/9/4/9694133/inserm-covid-19_report_lockdown_idf-20200412.pdf [previous reports at: www.epicx-lab.com/covid-19.html]

^[vii] The delay in containment is very relative given the time required to lower first the viral load.

^[viii] Even countries that have practised it on a large scale have tested only a small proportion of the population. Knowing that a person tested one day may be infected the next, it is an important tool but not a panacea. Both serological and screening tests should be used, with different uses. See the Vittoria Colizza report of 12 April 2020, cited above.

^[ix] The numbers have yet to be confirmed, and it is likely that this data will only be known in detail after the fact, as with many of the parameters associated with a new virus. With each new article, this data can be refined. See in particular report 9 of 12 April from Vittoria Colizza (cited above).

^[x] We must test as long as we can, tracing is only possible if the number of cases is relatively small, at the end of a crisis.