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Without a vaccine or any other treatments, life cannot simply return to normal after the first lockdown. Multiple efforts at social distancing will have to be put in place otherwise, Kissler said, because current healthcare capacity would not be able to support the surge of infections.

Giving the examples of South Korea and Singapore, researchers wrote that effective distancing could reduce the strain on healthcare systems and enable contact tracing and quarantine to be feasible.

Currently, there are no vaccines to treat the novel coronavirus and, so, periodic lockdowns would allow hospitals to ramp up their critical care capacity for when infections surge.

As vaccines become available, the length and severity of lockdowns can ease.

When cases begin to spike, herd immunity could also occur, said co-author Marc Lipsitch. Herd immunity refers to a situation in which enough people in a population have immunity to an infection to effectively stop the disease from spreading.

Photo by REUTERS/Christinne Muschi

On the other hand, the authors warn, if social distancing is pushed too far, where there are too many lockdowns, it could spell disaster.

With one of the models, “the social distancing was so effective that virtually no population immunity is built,” the paper said, hence the need for a middle ground.

The study acknowledged that prolonged distancing would most likely have profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences.