Covid-19 lockdown: A deal with the devil?

Every day during breakfast, my family and I religiously tune in to news channels, including BBC and CNN, to catch up on the Covid-19 situation around the world.

It has become an indispensable part of our dinner table conversations and musings as well, as I presume it has been for you and your family.

One thing that has caught my attention is how the news is roughly split into two streams: one is about how many lives the pandemic has unceremoniously snatched from us and another is about how billions worldwide, including Malaysians, are reeling from the unprecedented stay-at-home orders.

The news media are rightfully concerned with the latter – the pandemic response which has seen four billion people or around half the world being put under partial or complete lockdown.

This has caused unemployment rates to hit never-before-seen highs and has left millions without access to adequate supply of food. It will most definitely result in an avalanche of bankruptcies.

Malaysia itself has been under partial lockdown, called the movement control order (MCO), since March 18, with the period extended twice.

MCO is now scheduled to end on April 28 but no one can say for certain if there will be another extension or how this will affect the people and the economy in the long term.

And I can’t help but wonder – are we at a point where the cure is worse than the disease?

At what point should we draw a line in the sand and say that the economic and human impact that these partial or complete lockdowns are having is worse than the disease itself?

Unfortunately, those who have voiced similar concerns have been soundly bludgeoned or shamed into submission.

I understand why. Most of us are kind and loving and can’t imagine letting people die for financial gain. But money isn’t just money. Economic impact is human impact.

The stay-at-home orders have robbed millions of their livelihoods – and for many the ability to put food on the table for those they hold dearest.

This is an unmitigated tragedy. Michael Burry is the latest and probably most credible voice out there to be up in arms against the global lockdowns which he unapologetically calls “criminally unjust”.

Burry is an investor who correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis and shot to fame when he was portrayed by Christian Bale in the Oscar-winning movie, The Big Short. He also happens to be a medical doctor.

“If Covid-19 testing were universal, the fatality rate would be less than 0.2%. There is no justification for sweeping government policies, lacking any and all nuance, that destroy the lives, jobs, and businesses of the other 99.8%,” he tweeted.

In an email to Bloomberg News, he explained further: “Universal stay-at-home is the most devastating economic force in modern history. And it is man-made. It very suddenly reverses the gains of underprivileged groups, kills and creates drug addicts, beats and terrorises women and children in violent now-jobless households, and more. It bleeds deep anguish and suicide.”

He may be right. I see people’s livelihoods being trampled upon right in front of my eyes.

There is a morning vegetable market near my home that I frequent. Since the MCO, the vendors have been left out in the lurch, selling their produce in the shadows and moving their trucks around to evade the police.

What a sad predicament – honest vegetable sellers being treated like lowly drug dealers. All this has made me wonder – how much of the lockdowns and partial lockdowns are about politicians trying to ensure they are not blamed for acting slowly?

And how much about administrators being swallowed up by the mass hysteria that’s been the pandemic’s bedfellow while aping the questionable actions of their peers from neighbouring countries?

Are we sure we’re making data-driven decisions? Or have we adopted the much-maligned herd mentality that’s been proven to result in poor decisions and even poorer outcomes?

Princeton professor Peter Singer and Oxford’s Michael Plant say that we’re collectively suffering from a corollary of a well-known psychological phenomenon called “identified cause effect”.

It’s when people over-emphasise the cause of one known suffering to the detriment of others that are less clearly known.

An example: We’re more concerned about Covid-19 patients who are struggling to breathe and are hooked up to ventilators than with the faceless millions going hungry in the confines of their homes due to the lockdown. In addition, I would add that we are bad at second-order thinking. First order thinking is easy and widespread. It means, in this instance, instituting massive lockdowns to eradicate Covid-19.

Second order thinking requires us to carefully consider what the ramifications of such a lockdown would be and to weigh that against its purported benefits – which we are a lot less good at.

Yet another aspect of this debate is to inject some much-needed perspective. We’ve lost more than 120,000 people to Covid-19 as of now, which is obviously horrible.

However, there are some other big killers in the world as well.

Every year, air pollution causes an estimated seven million deaths, road accidents cause 1.35 million deaths, obesity causes 2.8 million deaths, cancer causes 9.6 million deaths and the seasonal flu causes anywhere between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths around the world.

Although we are aware of these modes of death, they by and large fly under the radar as we’re so desensitised to it. We mostly don’t care unless it happens to a dear friend or family member.

However, thanks to the global Covid-19 panic and the subsequent erratic response that included widespread lockdowns, Professor Paul Frijters, an economist at the London School of Economics, suggests that at least 10 million could perish worldwide, with the upper estimate being more than 50 million.

Let that sink in for a bit.

He writes: “These are the people that will die in years to come because the roads they drive on didn’t get repaired because of lack of funds because of the panic. These are the people that will die without proper healthcare because the health sector will have less funds as there is less to go round.

“These are the people that will die because their doctors, policemen, farmers, and everyone else is somewhat less competent because of the lower education due to the panic we now have. They will be the ones dying from diseases that sewage works would have prevented, but those sewage works were delayed. They will be the millions dying in civil wars as this economic meltdown pushes their social systems over the brink”.

Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center, takes a similar stance.
He writes: “As weeks of shutdown turn into months, this will get much worse. With many more people at home, this will likely lead to higher levels of domestic violence and substance abuse.

“As schools stay closed, the skills of the next generation erode. A 2010 study published in Health Economics shows closing schools in Britain for just 13 weeks could initially cost the British economy 8.1% of GDP.

“As more become unemployed and the economy plunges, we will all be able to afford much less, also leading to lower-quality healthcare for everyone. Politically, the outcome could be dire – the previous long-term recessions in the 1920-30s didn’t end well”.

He is, of course, referring to World War II which the recession contributed to.

They make a lot of sense, and force us to come back to the question – is the cure worse than the disease? No matter what our answer is, I have a sinking feeling that it’s too late to do much about it. - FMT