Coronavirus: This Is How China Is Preventing A Second Wave - And The UK Must Learn Lessons

The idea of a second wave of COVID-19 when most of the world is still submerged by the first is grim.

But Beijing's reaction offers lessons on how it can be contained.

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The outbreak at Xinfadi could have been a nightmare: a COVID cluster in a wholesale market that supplies more than 70% of the megacity's fruit and vegetables. But today the city reported just nine new cases.

The most critical aspect is speed, which informs every part of the response. Beijing did not hesitate in shutting schools and imposing various restrictions on gyms, bars and other venues.

Speed is also crucial in building capacity. There is no point in keeping massive infrastructure in place when cases are low. Instead, governments need to be prepared to scale up quickly when a wave arrives.

Over the last two weeks, Beijing has built 26 new test centres and doubled its testing capacity, to 230,000 tests a day.

By pooling samples, it means one million people can be screened every day. So far 2.3 million people have been tested.

Combine that with a massive contact-tracking programme. Hundreds of thousands of people have been tracked and notified to take a test. Much of that work is done manually but technology is also part of it.

China hasn't bothered with the sort of contact tracing app that the UK has struggled to get off the ground. Instead, it goes straight to the source, requiring mobile phone networks to provide their subscribers' location data.

Big data has a long reach. A Chinese colleague had the misfortune to be stuck in a traffic jam six kilometres away from Xinfadi before the outbreak began.

Eight days later she was contacted by the authorities and told to take a COVID-19 test. In the meantime, the health code app on her phone (which is based on various data sources) went from green to orange, telling her to stay at home.

That tech is backed up by bureaucratic muscle, with neighbourhood health committees knocking on doors to make sure people follow the app's instructions.

Western countries may not be willing to tolerate that level of authoritarian intervention, and may simply not be able to match China's scale.

But Beijing shows that even if a second wave is inevitable, it is not inevitably catastrophic. The UK was slow to learn and apply the lessons from the first wave in China. It shouldn't make the same mistake for the second.

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