Five measures that could prevent future lockdowns

That the World Health Organisation hasn’t exactly shone in the coronavirus crisis is now well-documented. It should remind us of the dangers of following one centrally-guided approach to tackling the disease. Thankfully, given how even experts have been unsure about how to respond to this enormous challenge, there was no unified EU response to Covid-19. Instead, European countries have been dealing with the virus using trial and error.

As a result, looking at the responses of European and Asian countries, we can now distinguish five important things that seem to have worked to prevent the need for a strict, economically devastating lockdown.

1. Testing people with mild symptoms

Even though Germany’s first locally transmitted Covid-19 case was before Italy’s, Germany has had almost six times fewer deaths – with a 30 per cent larger population. There are caveats: Germany is lucky that the average age of its Covid patients has been only