It’s never too late to mend

To borrow from Tomas Pueyo’s popular Covid metaphor, if we hammer it hard now, we will soon be dancing. To elaborate, if we apply the hammer of a lockdown to the coronavirus for not more than a few weeks, then we will be in a much better position to react to the ebb and flow — like in a complicated dance — of the infection, till the time an anti-virus is available.

To clarify further, the lockdown hammer is not a recipe to kill the virus altogether. But it does suppress the microbe to an extent of limiting the damage significantly and paving the way for getting back normal, besides ensuring that a second wave does not peak enough to disrupt life again. And mind you, the later the lockdown is imposed, the heavier and longer the hammer needed.

Save for a few countries, the whole world used the lockdown hammer — some instantly, some a little later, and some in the last resort. We, in Pakistan, too applied this hammer, but only half-heartedly and for a brief period. Our Prime Minister, Imran Khan, never believed in hammering a ‘little, flu like’ virus with an ‘enormous, countrywide lockdown’ — so as to protect the economy of the country, and thereby the livelihoods of the underprivileged class, in particular. He rushed to lift whatever lockdown restrictions were in place in the country — in sheer ignorance of the fact that the stronger the hammering, the earlier and longer-lasting the economic revival.

And, thus, Covid-19 was granted a free rein in the country, “for the sake of the poor”. We allowed the virus to mushroom freely within our borders, only to ensure that the fight against Covid-19 is a long haul — threatening an even bigger impact on the economy and a bigger expense of both life and livelihood.

With the corona carriers unleashed, science and maths suggest that a single one will — unknowingly — infect two and a half persons during his incubation period, and each of those infected will infect a further two and a half persons, and so on and so forth. If gone unhindered, this chain of transmission will only stop at herd immunity. Is this what forms the counter-corona strategy of the incumbent government? Well, no government representatives have declared it as their official policy, but what they are doing essentially means the same.

What is our mitigation strategy then? Self-deceit perhaps! As our principal strategy, we are expecting our people to adopt certain SOPs to keep the contagion at bay. We are, in fact, relying on the behavioural response of a public a big majority of whom have serious doubts about the very existence of a deadly pandemic in their midst — even after a hundred and fifty thousand Covid patients and three thousand deaths in the country. Jam-packed roads, cramped vehicles and overcrowded marketplaces — though not an unusual sight in urban centres during normal circumstances — aptly exemplify a public that cares a damn about a virus that has brought virtually the whole world to a halt.

The virus, meanwhile, did not catch us off-guard. It did us a great service by reaching us later than much of the world, allowing us a reasonable preparation time. We could clearly watch it go berserk in neighbouring China and Iran as well as in the US and Europe; and were in a good position to learn from their experiences and devise a strategy accordingly.

Conversely though, the microbe is proliferating in our country at a frightening rate of more than 6,000 positive cases a day, having already caused a near-collapse of our healthcare system. That it is knocking more than a hundred people into nothingness daily is no small scare, given that an expected peak is still about fifty days away.

So, have we missed the bus? Not exactly! It’s never too late to mend. It’s just that the later the lockdown is imposed, the heavier and longer the hammer needed — though some of the price paid in terms of human life is beyond recovery. And let’s be warned: any variants of a lockdown — like a smart, selective or sporadic — will only push the target ahead, adding to the containment time.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 18^th, 2020.

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