The hubris that lets us imagine that we can control things to go as per a plan is going to cost us heavily in the days to come. While the initial reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is completely understandable, but the continued lockdown is a mistake of humongous proportions. The assumption that longer lockdowns will somehow help control the virus and its fallout is where our political leadership has gotten it all wrong. In the years to come, when we will be able to look back at these last two months dispassionately, there will be books and papers written on how we should have reacted to the pandemic. I fear that none of them will have any kind words to say about the current dispensations around the world.
Let’s face it. While the reactions have ranged between immediate and utterly delayed, what has stood out is a clear lack of imagination.
While the initial reaction to lockdown things and control the spread is completely understandable and justifiable, it’s what happened later that baffles. Once it was clear that the pandemic was going nowhere fast, we should have changed track and moved away from enforced lockdowns to educated lockdown.
An enforced lockdown is good when you have a cure that you need to get to people without the virus spreading faster than you can get the cure to them. But when there is no cure, and no hope of figuring out one in the near future, an enforced lockdown is as dangerous, if not more, than keeping things open.
India is a perfect example of this fiasco playing out at its worst. As soon as it was clear that the lockdown was going to be a more permanent solution than first envisaged, the migrant workers all took to the roads to get back home. While there has been widespread condemnation of this, we need to pause and understand their behavior. While, all of us sat back and locked ourselves in our airconditioned homes, these people were living in cramped conditions in, more often than not, relatively highly priced shanties. Without an income, they were just being pushed deeper into debt. The only feasible action for them was to return to the poverty they came from, where at least they were not being pushed into deeper poverty with each passing unemployed minute. Like Amit Varma likes to point out, it is all about the incentives. The incentive of better income drew them to the cities and the disincentive of debt was driving them back.
When death stares you in the face today, you do not fear the death that is two weeks away.
So what should we have done?
The simplest answer, devoid of any nuance, would be – lift the lockdown. But let’s look at the nuances, shall we?
By allowing normal life to continue, albeit with regular and near continuous messaging about staying safe, we could have attempted to change people’s habits. Even if that didn’t work, as the number of people dying from the disease would explode, it would automatically bring a change in behavior. People would lock themselves down to the extent they could and that would have been a much more humane way to implement the lockdown.
By not giving people a chance to put things in place to prepare for what is essentially a permanent change of lifestyle, we have just postponed the inevitable – large-scale deaths. Many of those who will die will not even have the COVID-19 virus, but they are just as much victims of the virus as those dying directly of it. The sad truth is that the governments have woken up to this fact. Hence the desperate pleas from the various state governments to extend the lockdown. Again, incentives come into play here. At the next election, it will be easier to hide the large number of deaths from starvation, homelessness, and tiredness than to hide deaths directly from the virus.
We have painted ourselves into a corner here. Continue the lockdown and keep directly attributable deaths low, or lift the lockdown and suffer a large number of COVID-19-related deaths. Make no mistake – deaths there will be and in huge numbers at that.
As mentioned earlier, we are in this situation because of a lack of imagination. Our leaders do not know how to look further than their noses and hence, lack the imagination to see the effects of their actions.
Pavement Views 