Commentary: COVID-19 lockdowns don’t deserve their bad reputation

ITHACA, New York: Our recent experience with COVID-19 and the word “lockdown” once again illustrates the power of language to influence our lives and well-being.

The infinite variety of reality, and the finite number of words and phrases we have to describe it, creates an inescapable philosophical challenge to articulate politics.

Added to the challenge is our tendency to view a person’s use of certain words as a sign of their political ideology.

POLITIZED IN THE USA

In managing the pandemic, much of the political discussion has centered around the closures. But reducing the problem to a binary question (should we block or not?), Or even linear (how much should we block?), Oversimplifies a complicated problem.

The binary trend has been prominent in recent statements by US President Donald Trump. At an Iowa campaign rally shortly before the presidential election, Trump claimed that, “The Biden plan will turn America into a prison state and lock it up.”

He also tweeted that “Biden wants to CLOSE our country, maybe for years. Crazy! THERE WILL BE NO CLOSURES “.

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Trump’s brazen politicization of the COVID-19 political debate put left-wing groups on the defensive because, unlike the president, they accepted the science and generally favored certain aspects of the shutdowns.

TRAGIC MANAGEMENT OF PANDEMICS

To see why linearizing the lockdown debate is equally problematic, consider a restaurant where the menu asks how salty, on a scale of 0 to 10, you want your food to be.

Chaos will ensue, with some customers ordering a seven complaining they got a salty dessert, and others ordering a zero (because they wanted a pudding) complaining about their tasteless pizza.

Tragically, this situation has parallels in the real world of pandemic management, where politics has a thousand dimensions.

For example, governments can close bars while keeping schools open, or ask people who don’t wear masks to stay home and allow those who do to go outside.

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They can also insist on social distancing from vulnerable populations while placing fewer restrictions on people immune to COVID-19. Ignoring these options when designing so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions is a disaster.

GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS ARE EMERGING

That being said, a big pattern that hasn’t received enough attention is the geography of COVID-19.

The difference between the Americas and Europe, on the one hand, and Africa, Asia, and Oceania, on the other, in terms of cases and deaths is too great to be attributed solely to politics.

For example, it would be completely false for Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to proclaim the success of his pandemic policies by comparing his country’s crude death rate (CMR), the number of deaths from COVID-19 per million people, of 76 with the CMR. Spain’s 964. To be fair, it would be equally fallacious to say that US policy has failed because the US’s CMR is 827 while that of Vietnam, a much poorer country, is only 0.4.

The geographic pattern is so marked that there has to be an explanation in terms of past diseases and immunities, viral strains, ecology, or some other factor that we have not yet identified. To see the effect of the policy, we need to make comparisons within the region.

WHEN A LOCKOUT COMBUSTS SUPERPREADER EVENTS

The experience of India also demonstrates the risks of blocking semantics. On March 24, the Indian government announced a “blockade” that was supposedly even more severe than those in Europe, often described as the strictest possible.

The problem with this policy became apparent after a week or two. Authorities had not taken action for the country’s poor migrant workers who, stranded in urban centers with no work or pay, had no choice but to walk hundreds of miles back to their homes, mainly in the countryside.

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So while India’s cities, towns, and economy were locked in, the reverse was true for 23-40 million migrant workers. For them, this could be described as the “Great Unlocking”.

This misstep is now showing in the stats. The number of daily COVID-19 cases in India increased steadily for six months, a trend seen in very few places.

India’s CMR of 99 is now the highest among South and East Asian countries (and higher than most of Africa), largely because the ‘lockdown’ actually unlocked the coronavirus and spread it across the whole country.

INSTEAD OF LOCKDOWNS, PERSUADE POPULATIONS

But instead of regretting the past, we must move on. At least until a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine is available, all countries need different forms of limited blockages and personalized behavior rules.

And to the extent possible, this should be implemented through persuasion and leadership rather than through police enforcement.

Here is a suggestion. We have to start trusting people who have already had COVID-19 and are now immune. Rather than resort to compulsion, we should offer people with certified immunity attractive pay to take jobs that involve human physical contact and interaction.

This will help keep supply chains open and the overall economy running.

Once governments take the initiative, market forces will kick in and get the job done. This option is not without risks. But it has enormous potential, and economies that develop a functional “immune job market” can reap huge benefits.

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Now that the US elections are over, there seems to be more flexibility in the debate on the blockade. It is encouraging that many on the left support closures and adapted rules of behavior that can allow most of the economy and society to remain open.

Assuming that Trump, who has strongly opposed any lockdown, does not lock himself in the White House beyond January 20, 2021, the US response to COVID-19 is likely to be modified accordingly.

Hear from infectious disease experts discuss what a COVID-19 vaccine would look like:

Kaushik Basu, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and Senior Economic Advisor to the Government of India, is Professor of Economics at Cornell University and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.