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Vaccination and the elimination of Covid-19 should come above all else
The next six months will be crucial. That’s not a dire warning about having to stay locked in or to observe the so-called safety protocols. The second half of this year would probably account for a steady number of Covid cases per month, and that would have a serious impact on the economy that’s already limping due to the pandemic and its impact.
As a country we are most probably not going to see herd immunity due to vaccination at least until the beginning of next year. 70% of the population would have their jabs by the end of this year according to State Minister for Primary Healthcare, Epidemics, and Covid Disease Control Sudharshini Fernandopulle. That’s a long distance to go before we could consider the pandemic as being decisively a thing of the past.
Within these six months a lot could happen. The medical establishment presents the death count in the country in a way that seems to be designed to trigger alarm bells. The Government by and large seems to react without asking questions, locking down at the drop of a hat, and essentially considering all other issues, including the economy, as secondary at best.
But though the rulers lock down when the doctors sneeze, as if by Pavlovian reflex, and though the economy suffers – what happens if this pattern repeats in the next few months, until the end of 2021?
It means there would be a massive price to pay. Economic recovery despite the most optimistic predictions of the powers that be may become impossible if the situation drags until the end of this year. It means that this crisis has to be looked at as a one-of-a-kind event that’s happened since the granting of independence.
Never before has there been a make or break calamity that threatened long-term recovery in this manner – not even after the war ended in 2009. There may be some cause for optimism in the way the world economy seems to be poised to recover, but the best strategy would be to hope for the best, and plan for the worst.
That’s because hindsight is 20/20 – and that has nothing to do with what happened in 2020, but everything to do with what happened this year, 2021. The keyword of these first six months was variant.
Another key word was clusters – new Covid clusters seemed to appear from nowhere, though some say the origin was from across our shores because there was migration across the Palk Straits that we couldn’t possibly halt.
There is no definitive information as to how this escalation occurred, but it’s clear that there were recurring events that the Government could not control. What could be said about recurring events is that despite the best intentions of the administration, they could, well, recur…
Theoretically at least, that reality holds for the next six months which is why an extraordinary strategy is called for in the wake of a situation that has seen no parallels in the duration of this nation’s entire post-independence phase.
But the Government seems to have too many irons in the fire and is running away with the idea that Covid could be tackled as a subsidiary issue, while the usual business of the State goes on in fits and starts.
To say the least, that’s extraordinarily optimistic! It’s the Government that is shutting down the economy with travel restrictions, so it’s the Government that knows best that these are not normal times, when the usual five-year plans and two-year plans could be put to work.
But yet, it’s as if the administration is pretending that it’s all in a day’s work and it’s frontline leadership that could fiddle – with the rest of its manifesto – while Rome burns. The fertiliser controversy, the urban development projects, and the controversies arising from a myriad of other issues, including, of course, the Port City project, are distracting in a way that’s blurring the main issue totally out of focus.
Now, any government’s frontline leadership should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, no matter the breadth of the crisis. But, can this Government do it? Has it displayed a record of achievement that gives its leadership pass marks on balancing the demands from the other policy-related issues with the one major task it has on its hands – that of controlling Covid?
This writer’s take on the poser would be for the Government to take a very close look at its priorities, taking into full cognisance its own possible limitations. Does the Government’s crisis management team, both at the political and the administrative level, have what it takes to juggle all of these crises at the same time, some being of their own creation, such as the problems in the agricultural sector as a result of the total ban on chemical fertilisers?
This should be a serious question for the regime, even though it may seem an affront to question any leadership’s capability to multitask.
But as stated earlier, if we are facing what’s patently the greatest crisis since independence – certainly the greatest on the economic front – the folks who mind the shop should never be overconfident. Go on by all means and battle on multiple fronts if the leadership is certain that it has the crisis management chops to do the job – but otherwise, take a step back, breathe easy, and disengage and do the one job that everybody wants finished, which is to finish off Covid.
It seems to have been, whether by default or otherwise, the strategy of most other governments including the British and the US. The world’s one superpower focussed all its energies on a vaccination programme and virtually stood still on all other fronts, which incidentally is rather uncharacteristic of administrations in that country, in the first 100 days or thereafter.
But it does seem that this strategy on Covid succeeded. Once the pandemic is out of the way, there are three years for the new US administration to focus on the other issues and the fact is that nobody there is complaining because to a man, and a woman, they all wanted this crisis out of the way before all else.
Believe it or not, Sri Lankans feel the same way about this plague too. The health standpoint is so inextricably intertwined with the economic aspect, and on the latter front, Covid has dealt a body blow to people’s hopes. They want a government that even if its singular focus is Covid eradication and strictly that alone, it gets the job done.
Most have lost the patience for other controversies because they feel they cannot be watching a performance with the fiddle while Rome burns. Even in the real Rome they didn’t do this, when Italy was reeling from Covid not so long ago. They put their heads down and focussed on eradicating this virulent pandemic, and that’s what governments usually do when Rome is burning.
Pride should not get in the way because it’s seen that Covid anyway is no respecter of egos. A great deal of pomposities have been punctured already, and those who boasted at this time of the year in 2020, of having made a piece of cake out of Covid, are now eating a fair quantity of crow. That’s okay; nobody expected this third or whichever wave to rear its head and anyway nobody expected the Government to keel over and close shop entirely in the face of this new wave either.
But now that all this has happened, with the benefit of hindsight and bruised egos, if there is only one way to skin this cat and if that’s by making Covid the single issue for the next six months, please do it. Because even if the politicians stand on their head and say otherwise, the people have only one issue in mind now – and that’s to get rid of this gargantuan headache without any more damage to the economy than has already been done.
(The writer is a former Editor-in-Chief of three national English language publications and a practising Attorney-at-Law. He is an Editors’ Guild award-winning columnist, and contributing writer and columnist for the Nikkei Asian Review and South China Morning Post, while his editorials have been published in The Australian)