On our own

When the story of Covid-19 in Pakistan is written, let it show how indecisiveness doomed a country.

When the first case was diagnosed within our borders, we should have gotten a clear statement by the government on the severity of the challenge we were facing. Instead we were told it was just like the seasonal flu. This was followed by a parade of unforgivable downplaying: only the elderly needed to worry, it would go away during the summer months, lockdowns were ineffective. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, our judicial leadership compared the virus to kidney failure and ordered all shopping malls be reopened.

Oh, and we also allowed congregational prayer in mosques.

To borrow from the film Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

Whether you are for lockdowns or not, one thing we can all agree on is that the government’s messaging has been poor. Adding to the problem at every turn.

Which makes it ironic that the Prime Minister, in his latest speech, blamed the people for not taking the virus seriously. Now, to be sure, the public at large is partly to blame. But the state cannot absolve itself of all blame for this. Throughout the world, the countries with the best responses to Covid-19 had one thing in common: clarity from their leadership that they were facing an unprecedented challenge.

This was regardless of whether the country was rich or poor. Take Vietnam as an example, it limited its infections to 332 because it utilised an effective communication strategy portraying the seriousness of the virus from day one. Similarly, in New Zealand, Jacinda Arden minced no words in telling people that they were entering a new normal. We could have done the same regardless of our place on the global economic ladder.

The path of bad communication has led to disaster in nearly every instance of this pandemic. In America, Trump rejected the views of experts for months and played down the threat; Boris Johnson wanted people in Britain to keep socialising; the Italians conducted a masterclass in ignorant communication; and the less said about Brazil the better.

Unfortunately, the only clear message we’ve gotten is to fend for ourselves. Despite the fact that it is at exactly these points in time when the government must, well, govern.

Pakistan decided to ease its short-lived and rather flimsy lockdown despite cases in the country not having peaked. Last week, the Prime Minister chose to ignore a letter from the World Health Organization, and a report by the Punjab government spelling catastrophe, in rejecting another lockdown. In doing so he made a utilitarian decision: some must die so that the economy may live.

And death will come: According to Imperial College London, Pakistan’s strategy will result in 80,000 deaths by August. The problem with this sort of utilitarian reductivism is that it reduces human life to a mathematical formula. Someone’s parents, children, and loved ones become statistics.

It also ignores the fact that one of the chief victims of Covid-19, if we continue to avoid taking hard decisions about the virus, will be our frontline healthcare workers. They continue to battle without proper protective equipment an overwhelming surge of new cases. The government’s unwillingness to make their job easier by imposing a lockdown is stunning. They are another group left on their own during a global health crisis.

Meanwhile, the numbers keep rising: Pakistan’s cases are nearing 150,000 with 2,729 deaths. The actual numbers are likely to be far greater given the lack of mass testing. Our R0 (rate of infection) is nearing 2.

Still the Prime Minister seems to prefer a strategy of herd immunity over a lockdown. In one of his speeches, he asked: what have other countries achieved from lockdowns? Quite a bit, actually. After imposing a lockdown, more than 40 countries across the world have contained the virus. The UK, Italy, France, and Spain have seen their cases fall significantly once they decided to impose a lockdown.

In fact, it is countries like Sweden, around which our strategy was moulded, that have achieved the least in this fight. Sweden bet on herd immunity and failed. It now leads the pack amongst the Nordic countries for the highest number of deaths per million. Studies show that herd immunity strategies can result in the virus killing between 0.4-1% of the entire population.

Herd immunity seems even more problematic given that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently stated that there is no evidence of immunity from the virus in people who have recovered. This also seems to be playing out in China, where a second wave of infections has already begun.

The trade-off between the economy and human life seems to rest heavy on Imran Khan’s mind. But does he realise that if left unchecked it will almost certainly be the poor who will suffer the most from the virus? The poor after all cannot isolate, as he himself stated, meaning entire families will fall sick at the same time. They also lack the funds to get the best healthcare. A sick individual cannot go to work if he is a daily labourer, and if he does, he will infect more people.

Contrary to what the PM thinks, it is the rich who will benefit from the easing of the lockdown. The rich can isolate, the rich can work from home, the rich can get the best medical services.

There is information out there, information that the government isn’t mentioning, that belies the PM’s claims about economic disaster if we lock down the country. According to The New York Times, experts and scientists claimed that the fastest route to economic normalcy involves controlling the spread of the virus. Sweden’s economy did no better even though it did not impose a lockdown. An MIT study cited by Kamran Yousaf for his column stated that an effective lockdown and taking care of public health generates a strong economic rebound later.

When I last wrote about Covid-19, I urged our leaders to reassess our country’s priorities. Looking at the latest budget, I see it was futile to hope. We are truly on our own in the midst of a pandemic.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 16^th, 2020.

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