Sometimes the logic is not obvious

But common sense cannot be viewed only through a political lens.

WHEN I was still a young student, I once had the opportunity to learn how to ski. Not being an athletic person, it was not easy for me to deal with the cold, the equipment and, most of all, the strange things I had to get the hang of to go down a slope safely. One of the most difficult was to accept that if I wanted to turn in one direction, I had to shift my body weight to the opposite direction. To turn left, I had to lean right and somehow the physics of that action gets my skis to move where I want them to. To me, it was totally counterintuitive and didn’t make sense. But it worked.

Counterintuitive actions often work because although they seem strange to the bystander, there is a logical basis underlying them. That logic may not be obvious at first but repeated actions make them clearer and more understandable. But if they don’t work, then their justification becomes questionable.

As an example, in January, our government rolled out what seemed like a counterintuitive move in a democracy. They declared an emergency and closed down Parliament because, they said, this would help them manage the Covid-19 pandemic without all sorts of distracting political noise. This so-called logic was quickly dismantled. Politicians kept blabbering away, some because they realised that their power to make laws had been taken away from them, accompanied by the even louder cacophony on social media. In other words, the noise got worse rather than ceasing.

At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic, for which the counterintuitive move was initiated, only got worse, rather than better. Nearly 420,000 people have been infected this year alone, about four times more than all of last year. And sadly, we lost more than 2,000 people due to Covid-19 in the first five months of 2021 compared with last year’s 471 fatalities.

It seems that the logical scaffolding for the emergency declaration and the suspension of Parliament is not holding up. This may be because the action is operating under a completely different intuition, that of self-preservation.

In many ways public health and epidemiology works both intuitively and counterintuitively. When you have a pandemic, epidemiologists instinctively know that they should confine and contain. They won’t allow people to move about, not until they’re sure that everyone within a hotspot has been tested and declared free of the disease. Amateurs, however, act in a way that is intuitive to them – send everyone to the safety of their own homes, but that is counterintuitive to epidemiological common sense. That would allow people from areas of high infection to move about freely, suffering amnesia about the fact that the virus needs human bodies and the air they breathe out to get it places.

How happy would the virus be when politicians who have been exposed are not required to isolate themselves at home? It must have been delirious when untested students were allowed to go home to their families all over the country, and then return to their universities after the Hari Raya celebrations. “All homegoing students are required to adhere to the SOP” they said without saying how this was going to be guaranteed. “Once they return to campus, they will be screened and those without symptoms will be allowed to return to their hostels and classes” was the self-satisfied justification. Obviously someone has not read the articles about asymptomatic people being able to spread the virus far easier than the symptomatic ones for the precise reason that they are allowed to roam free. Counterintuitive thinking at work: if you can’t see it, they don’t have it.

There are howlers galore that would be hilarious if they weren’t actually dangerous. There was that domestic tourism policy where you could not travel in your own car across borders but instead – raise eyebrows here – must take a tour bus. Which genius thought it safer to get into a air-conditioned, enclosed bus with some 20 strangers for several hours than to sit in a private car with people you live with? I wonder what the families of those people who got infected on such a bus tour are thinking. Oh wait, they should have known not to get on a bus. It must be their own fault.

Which brings us to LRTs, MRTs and other enclosed people-transporting tubes. The intuitive thing is to shut them down so that people are not kept in close quarters with one another. But people still rely on them to get to work, those who cannot stay home for one reason or another. So you keep them running but with fewer trains.

Unfortunately, if you do that, more people will have to crowd into the coaches rendering it impossible to maintain physical distancing. We know, if we read at all, that the virus is airborne and the safest places are well-ventilated ones. Would this be true of LRTs? Isn’t that why, even if there had not been such a terrible accident, 231 passengers on one train would still have been endangered?

Common sense seems only to be viewed through a political lens. We can’t have picnics in parks, for example, because politicians are so used to spreading food around and inviting strangers to eat with them. Restaurants that have not greeted diners in months now have to close earlier in order to sell less takeaway food. Markets and bazaars can stay open because how else can votes be guaranteed? At this rate, will we have a surge of dead voters still on the rolls in the next elections?

Intuition would tell us that every person is at risk, and every person is a risk. Therefore why treat some differently than others, as if the poor and the powerless, and the less glamorous are riskier than others and need to be punished more harshly?

The only thing that seems to have gone well is the vaccination programme, if you can get an appointment. Once you do, the process is the most orderly that’s ever been organised in this country.

But there are complaints about the large numbers of no-shows. The instinct is to blame those who don’t turn up for wasting everyone’s time. The counter instinct, however, would be to look at why people are supposedly shying away. Perhaps it is just an arduous task to even get to a vaccination centre. So as the old saying goes, if Mohamad won’t come to the mountain, why not take the mountain to wherever it is needed? Besides mobile vaccination clinics, why not set up vaccination centres in shopping malls? You can get jabbed and shop at the same time. Safety and economy done.

Marina Mahathir instinctively wants to get under the covers and stay there until all this is over. But realises that, counterintuitively, it is better to be awake and be a thorn in the side of those currently leading the country.