Commentary by José Álvares*
In the US, protesters opposing lockdown restrictions have been gathering and shouting slogans such as “Give me liberty, or give me COVID-19” – and with such close-contact behaviour, you might indeed get the virus, but freedom, well, not so much when you find yourself in a cramped hospital.
Without a vaccine (or a way to inject oneself with disinfectant without dying), do people really know what herd immunity implies? Basically, and assuming individuals who recover from the virus cannot get re-infected (which is not yet a given), a significant portion of the population (let’s say, based on a given research, about 70 percent) would need to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.
With the World Health Organisation (WHO) preliminarily putting the current fatality rate at 3-4 percent that means a lot of people, namely those with pre-existing conditions, would die. We could be talking about 1 percent of the world’s population and that if the global health system doesn’t collapse. As a young healthy person concerned about the future of the economy, primal survival instinct would be that this doesn’t really concern me.
Having said that, if we can’t care for the vulnerable, what does it say about us as civil society? Among those most at risk are the seniors, people who spent their lives bringing riches to the world that we youngsters now get to inherit and enjoy equipped with the education our elders dedicated time and effort to give us. Don’t we owe them a modicum of gratitude? We’ve come to a point in society that we can actually afford to not leave people behind and not to impose life-threatening sacrifices for the sake of the economic well-being of others.
Social distancing remains the [only] viable solution and one that has successfully been used in the past. Places that have imposed most stringent restrictions on movement of people seem to be faring better. In that regard, it is worth comparing China’s recovery with that of Singapore. The city-state was initially doing well but faltered in its response to the so-called “second wave”, albeit it spread mostly within a specific sector of the community.
Sweden has been touted as proof that social distancing isn’t required – but is it really the case? To start with, the country has in normal times one of the highest percentages of people working remotely in Europe and slightly less than half the country’s households are composed of just one person. In any case, tourism in the famous domestic destination of Gotland decreased 96 percent and traffic in Stockholm went down 75 percent (nothing normal about this, as the politicians there recognised). They’ve the highest number of confirmed novel coronavirus cases in Scandinavia, which they fight off with a good health system – 5.4 physicians per 1,000 population while there are still about 45 percent of WHO member countries that have less than 1 doctor per 1,000 inhabitants.
We cannot ignore the dire consequences to the economy caused by the restrictive measures – in a capitalist society we live in, this can lead to misery and, ultimately, without the production of goods, unemployment will be the least of our concerns. The shock to the economy has been deep and it will still take time for the financial support governments are churning out to trickle down to those that actually need it (assuming it gets there).
This is not to say that we can achieve some balance by having our healthier workforce returning to work while shielding the more feeble segment of the population – but we need to remain vigilant and wary. Solidarity remains the key driver out of this crisis – those that are better positioned help out others not so fortunate. In the end, we can only thrive if the community around us also does.
*José Álvares is a co-founder and partner of CA Lawyers
