Thin red line between economy and health

O Fighting the Covid pandemic while ensuring financial well-being is a fine balancing art

PETALING JAYA: Dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic while ensuring continued economic sustainability is a fine balancing act.

An over-emphasis on one can easily take a toll on the other, according to economists and health experts.

For now, it seems, the situation is tilted in favour of ensuring the economy does not collapse.

Even with the imposition of the third movement control order (MCO 3.0) from tomorrow, the cost to the economy is expected to be only about RM300 million a day, according to a note issued by Public Investment Bank Bhd yesterday.

This is a significant drop from the weeks under MCO 1.0 in March and April last year when the economy lost an estimated RM2.4 billion a day, according to professor of economics Dr Yeah Kim Leng.

Whether or not MCO 3.0 will curb the rate of infection is still unclear, but if the experience of several states that have been under MCO for the past week is anything to go by, the impact falls short.

Selangor, Johor, Perak, Terengganu, Penang, Pahang and Kuala Lumpur were the first to be put under lockdown before Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin announced on Monday that the measure would be extended to the rest of the country.

Despite the lockdown, Selangor continued to register more than 1,000 new infections a day.

Yeah, who is with the Sunway University Business School, said the country is in a dilemma. He pointed out that a total lockdown nationwide, even if it is only for a short period, would be a quick way to break the chain of transmission but it will also lead to huge losses for the economy.

On the other hand, he added, a more targeted MCO with fewer restrictions would result in lower compliance with the SOP and, coupled with inadequate contact tracing and quarantine capabilities, it is difficult to suppress the infection rate.

Datuk Dr Rajah Rasiah, professor of economics at the Asia-Europe Institute of University of Malaya, is even more pessimistic.

Even a less restrictive lockdown, he told theSun, will hurt small businesses.

He agreed that the just imposed countrywide lockdown is inevitable. “But there needs to be focus on the enforcement of the SOP through ensuring that the people observe them rather than simply raising fines for offences committed which have failed to deter wrongdoers,” he added.

Alternatively, epidemiologist Professor Datuk Dr Awang Bulgiba Awang Mahmud said the government should have opted to suppress the virus hard enough and kept its finger on the pulse of the pandemic by monitoring suitable indicators while gradually easing restrictions.

He believes that the pandemic management undertaken in the country has been reactive rather than proactive.

He said that after MCO 1.0, the authorities did not address issues that he had raised such as migrant workers, syndromic surveillance, better data analyses and indicators as well as a revision of the Pandemic Preparedness Plan.

“The second MCO was a confusing mess of half-hearted measures as the authorities had failed to detect cases early on because there was no early warning system and no apparent desire to fully utilise big data and technology to the fullest.

“They disregarded advice from public health experts about data analysis, did not share data and did not bother to engage behavioural scientists and communication specialists,” he said.