Eased lockdown results in one big ‘told you so’
THE partial lifting of lockdown restrictions in Metro Manila and other parts of the country over the weekend were met with a very predictable, natural reaction by the publicZ The majority ignored all cautions that the loosened rules in no way indicates that the threat from the wuhan Virus has diminished and flocked to malls and other reopened businesses to satisfy appetites that have been starved by two months of virtual house arrest.
That in turn elicited a predictable frustrated “I told you so” by public health and other officials who have some understanding of what “epidemic” actually means, and raised the possibility that everyone’s new found freedom might be shortlived.
The unfortunate reality is that, short of an unlikely ideal situation in which an effective vaccine is widely available and has been administered to most of the population, the country cannot avoid a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. The only known defense against the coronavirus infection is to prevent human- to- human contact, but doing that by imposing some form of lockdown is catastrophic to the economy.
what tips the balance in favor of a decision to ease quarantine restrictions and “open up” the economy to some degree is the fact that the government desperately needs revenues. Forget the posturing aspirations of economic growth, achieving better credit ratings or rising above third- world status — without some economic activity to generate revenues, the government cannot adequately fund the public health effort. That effort includes medical needs — primary care, testing for the infection, transmission investigation or “contact tracing,” medical equipment and supplies, and research — and socioeconomic support for households and businesses.
what the Star Chamberlike Interagency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases ( IATF- EID) is evidently trying to do is to strike a sort of happy medium[ enough quarantine restrictions to at least partly check the spread of the infection, and enough freedom of movement to generate some revenue and reduce the cost of economic support programs. Unfortunately, trying to meet two divergent goals usually means falling short on both, and the Philippines is not strong enough in either area — it does not have a first- rate health system, nor does it have adequate financial resources — to concentrate on one goal or the other.
That is not intended to sound as a criticism of the government, because as we have seen over the past several months, there may be no government on Earth that has the capacity to withstand the effects of the pandemic without suffering serious damage. New Zealand and Taiwan are perhaps examples[ but on the other hand, South Korea and Singapore were once considered success stories, too, and both have taken a serious hit from a “second wave” of infections. Given the broad circumstances the IATF- EID and the Duterte administration have to work with, I would be hard put to suggest a better plan than what they have devised — perhaps a few details could be improved, and I personally would spend much less time than they seem to do on creating acronyms and descriptive terms for initiatives, but in general, the protocols of “modified enhanced community quarantine” and “general community quarantine” with targeted lockdowns of particular infection hot spots seems to be about the best that can be expected.
That is discouraging, because the only way it can work positively — that is, generate even modest economic growth ( anything above zero percent should be considered fantastic at this point) while at the same time gradually reducing the incidence of coronavirus infections – is if the general population behaves with discretion and self- disciplineZ Treating all exposure outside the safety of their homes as a serious infection risk, and limiting that exposure to only those activities that are otherwise critical to survival. Going to the mall to buy milk tea is probably not one of those activities, for most people.
Thus, what we can likely look forward to for the foreseeable future is a vicious cycle of periodic lockdowns, resulting in both a delayed economic recovery — certainly not a “V-shaped” recovery, or a “w,” or a “U,” but probably more like an “L” — and thousands of infections and deaths. That is still a better scenario than a complete economic collapse, millions of infections and deaths, or both, and so we probably ought to make the best of it, inject a bit of realism into our planning and outlook, and act accordingly.