Stay locked down — and let us ask for help
Just 10 days into the coronavirus lockdown and there are already experts out there on social media telling us “it isn’t working”. No surprise about the negativity. Putting an unequal society into lockdown was bound to show up the inequalities rather than suppress them. Poor people living centimetres away from each other can’t isolate like the rich with walk-in fridges in their kitchens.
So the poor have been behaving badly, queueing close up for entry to shops and bundling into taxis to get to work, where they have it. In some places shops have been broken into and looted.
With just 12 more sleeps to go, however, we have to ask ourselves whether three weeks is enough. I don’t think it is. Either the government, through this lockdown, is able to locate and isolate all citizens infected with the coronavirus, or not. And if it isn’t, then how can it possibly justify lifting the lockdown?
On the other hand, for how long can a fragile economy such as ours close down without it causing irreparable damage? Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, says the Swedes are carrying on as usual. “There is, still, no lockdown there,” he wrote last week. “Shopping centres remain open, as are most schools and firms. Many work from home, many don’t — all are at liberty to choose. When I called a friend in Stockholm to ask about the Swedish experiment, he was on his way to a book launch.”
The Swedes think the rest of Europe is experimenting (with lockdowns), not them. “Swedes,” writes Nelson, “tend to have more of a sense of the economy as the engine of the welfare state: damage one, and you damage the other.”
And that’s the excruciating dilemma facing us. How much (more) damage can our economy take before it is simply incapable of funding the state and, particularly, welfare payments? Do we extend the lockdown because clearly not enough testing and isolating will have been done? Or do we lift it and live with what we have in the hope we can get some economic activity going again?
Perhaps there’s a middle way. We partly lift it. People are allowed to move around but not between provinces, not without masks (that debate, surely, is done) and always alone unless they require assistance. No gatherings, and two people within three metres of each other constitute one.
Not much gets us off the hook, unfortunately. The University of
Chicago’s Initiative on Global Markets invited a large panel of respected economists to respond to a list of statements, one of which was: “Abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk.” No-one disagreed.
An early end to the lockdown here haunts health minister Zweli Mkhize. Most testing in SA has been done by private laboratories for private patients. “This means we don’t yet have a true picture of the size of the problem,” he said last week. “… the release of a lockdown may have a huge rebound effect of releasing every constraint that made the infection slow down and we may have a runaway train with no way to apply brakes”.
No-one knows what is going on. Least of all the Chinese, who continue to lie about the way the virus developed. Even paragons of rectitude like the British are being found out. Having stopped dithering over how to respond, Boris Johnson’s government finally went into lockdown when a pillar of the establishment, Imperial College London, produced a paper in mid-March predicting more than 500,000 deaths in the UK, a number arrived at using 13-year-old software!
President Cyril Ramaphosa is going to have to find a way to both save lives and the economy. We must not be shy of approaching the International Monetary Fund for soft loans to help. There’s already a queue.
Would another 10 days of lockdown help? And are even experienced doctors able to produce accurate numbers of people who die of Covid-19 or merely with it because they were already compromised upon admission.
My wife and I just got tested. About 15 people at a wedding party we went to are now positive. We were negative and I almost regret it. It means we can still, unless we are hideously careful, get infected.
At the end, I’m afraid, we will probably be left with nature, or herd immunity, where so many people have it and survive that the virus cannot advance. I can’t see any way around it.