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How much time have you wasted due to Covid-19? Your company, if you work in one? Your business, if you have one?
How long has the economy lost to Covid-19? The country?
Tip: The answer to any of these questions is 54 days.
That, 54 days, is, of course, the duration of the blockade until May 17 (it was supposed to end on May 3, but the Home Office on Friday extended the blockade for two more weeks, although the expanded range of activities allowed this the period suggests that this is more a gradual and gradual exit from the blockade rather than a hard extension). The latest zoning document from the Ministry of Health, the country is divided into red, orange and green zones, shows that around a third of the country’s population (according to the last census) lives in the so-called red zones, the most affected by the pandemic – and even in these, there has been a significant relaxation of blocking restrictions. An analysis by the Hindustan Times shows that 14 of the country’s 15 most densely populated districts, including all of Delhi, parts of Mumbai and Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chandigarh are in the red zone.
Coronavirus outbreak: full coverage
Some of the smart people I have spoken to, one of the benefits of being a journalist is that you have access to many smart people, without being smart yourself. Say the question about lost time cannot be answered now simply because there is still no cure for Covid-19, there is no vaccine, and it is not known how much things would get worse.
The general consensus is that if the doubling rate is the number of days it takes to double the number of infections; This is currently 11.5 days in India: it stays the same, and the central government as well as state governments and local administrations follow the guidelines of the home ministry and allow what is allowed (without making a fuss about it), then, Things should start to return to normal by the end of May, perhaps June. Except that everyone admits it, it will be a new normal.
The infection will worsen from time to time and hopefully in specific areas, which will require its containment, but people will get used to the new normal of wearing masks, perhaps even gloves, social distancing, restricted travel, working from home. and The almost ritualistic cleanliness that must follow any excursion.
Most people also said that they would like to think that India has dodged the bullet, that things won’t get as bad here as they did in Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom, but that they are not sure.
So, assuming this is really the scenario that unfolds, let’s go back to the question about time.
Even for companies that will recover almost immediately after the crisis (essentials and consumables, for example), this financial year, 2020-21, will last only nine months.
For many others, it will be even shorter. And the expectation, even among IT service companies, who get most of their income from service companies in other parts of the world, is that, as much as the year is, it will also be a very bad year.
In temporal terms, that means a company can be considered lucky if it ends 2021-22 (next financial year) where 2019-20 (the last financial year) would have ended, as long as the last month was not blocked due to COVID-19.
In simple terms, that means a two-year loss.
Personal finances, for those with investment portfolios, could take as long to recover, perhaps more, except for survivors who invest in gold and nothing else.
But this is at the level of big business and the salaried working class, although many of the former will now focus on reducing costs and at least some of the latter will lose their jobs.
Many small businesses will sink, years of hard work wiped out by a Black Swan event. And many people who stopped being poor: India’s great achievement in the years between 2006 and 2016 was lifting 271 million people out of poverty, according to a United Nations report, they will fall back into poverty. We have no idea how many yet.
An April UN working document spoke of poverty “levels similar to those registered 30 years ago” in some countries, and the possibility that the total number of poor people in the world will increase by 420-580 million.
It will be a new post-Covid world
