At last, COVID clampdown but is a 3-day ban enough?

Is Port City bill dictating Govt’s lockdown agenda

Despite its earlier proclaimed determination not to enforce lockdowns come what may and cripple economic activity further, the Government was forced, in the face of rising COVID cases and deaths, to make a welcome climbdown from its intransigence and bring itself to grudgingly declare on Wednesday a three-day ‘travel ban’ -- stopping short of labelling it either as a lockdown or curfew.

Earlier on Monday, the Government had announced that travel between the nine provinces will be banned on Tuesday midnight till May 30 as a means of stemming the rising COVID tide. Though it was initially hailed a welcome preventive measure, deeper analyses soon proved it was nothing more than a cosmetic exercise, designed only to create the semblance of action.

Banning travel between the provinces was ineffective in a land where the coronavirus had spread beyond the clusters and was running amok throughout the whole community. The Government announced the same day, it was also planning to restrict travel between the districts but even this plan to marginally reduce the ambit of the COVID domain was met with the same disdain and was dismissed as futile.

The virulent virus has enough stomping ground and a ready supply of fodder in a district, let alone a province, for it to multiply its growing tally of scalps. A particular district’s contagion can aggravate beyond measure without help from its brethren, active in other districts with an abundance of victims to lay claim.

The folly of travel bans between provinces or districts or even Grama Niladhari Divisions as a means to reduce the alarming increase in COVID cases, when the real need is to prevent social mingling even in a village, led to the Association of Medical Specialist dispatching a letter to the President on Monday, warning the Government on the danger of pursuing meaningless area bans without banning people mixing within it. They said: “the current practice of isolating communities at the GN division level is neither preserving economic activity nor controlling transmission of COVID.”

The Government’s laissez-faire attitude toward the impending COVID catastrophe had to end, it was clear. It was time to adopt the hands- on, interventionist role to avert a worse disaster waiting to happen. Closing the provincial or district gates and let the flock frolic free was not enough.

The long awaited clampdown or lockdown or curfew euphemistically called by the Government ‘travel ban’ or ‘travel restrictions’, as similar to a curfew but not a curfew, was perhaps, prompted, by COVID Minister Sudharshani Fernandopulle’s timely warning on Wednesday morning. She told the media, the predictions made by an independent health research centre in the US of 10,000 to 20,000 cases and 200 deaths a day would certainly come to pass if no interventionist action is taken.

On Friday, the Deputy Director General of Health Services, Dr. Hemantha Herath, warned the alarming surge of COVID cases will continue unabated for another two weeks, with a downward trend expected only thereafter.

With such warnings given by its own COVID Czars and other red alerts flashing danger, why is the Government still dragging its feet to take effective, meaningful, concerted, preventive action to stem the rising tide of infections and deaths, opting, instead, to impose half-hearted measures like a threeday token ‘travel ban’ till Monday morn and 11pm to 4am travel bans till the end of May when what is called for is a complete lockdown for at least two weeks?

God forbid, but could it be that the paramount importance the Government attaches to see the controversial Port City Bill enacted in Parliament, come what may, this week despite the Opposition’s demand for a delay, is the compelling motive for its seeming apathy to declare all- out war on the coronavirus which has laid siege on the land and infected 136,685 and claimed 900 lives since its Lankan occupation in March last year?

Even at this eleventh hour, in the midst of alarm, it behoves the Government to show that it places the health of the nation above all else.