Malaysians opening up the economy too fast is human sacrifice, I’d say. I can’t put it any milder after learning from the case of the US and New York City as the world’s epicentre.
I have taught world history as well and the history of global infectious diseases. Learn particularly from the 1918 pandemic (the Spanish Flu which started in Kansas, US). Learn from the US today, after the protests in its red states. The economy can wait to recover. Lives lost prematurely can't be your policy!
Why are we risking our young and the elderly by reopening the economy now? How many spikes in cases and how many deaths do you wish to see?
Malaysia will see a spike in Covid-19 cases. A month after May 4. Too eager to open. Too slow in thinking that we can still wait and use data to predict and project and take precautions. Opening daycare centres is a huge mistake. Child fatality next? Think!
A recent international report on the human predicament in the US during this pandemic reads:
"The relaxation of social-distancing rules will more than offset any decline in transmissions that might come from warmer weather and stronger containment measures, such as more wide-scale testing and tracing the contacts of infected people so they too can be tested and isolated, Murray said." (Dr Christopher Murray of the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics [IHME]).
The revised IHME projections coincided with the disclosure of an internal Trump administration forecast predicting a surge in Covid-19 cases killing 3,000 Americans a day by the end of May, up from a current daily toll that a Reuters tally places at around 2,000.
That projection, first reported by the New York Times and confirmed by a Reuters source, also forecast about 200,000 new coronavirus cases each day by the end of the month, up from the current rate of about 25,000 cases every 24 hours.
Every country must ask also this question: What if the vaccine still cannot be developed as fast as it can to stop the death of millions? What radical adjustments to everything should be made?
Scenarios are good. Best case and worst case. Alternate reality should be crafted and lived in. Not lamenting things past. We must learn to get used to changes so abrupt that our psychological and cultural well-being will be radically affected. Change can be painful, especially as “economic beings” (homo economicus) our lives collectively is dictated both by the state and by market forces.
Today we are seeing the welfare state taking care of those whose lives have been ravaged by the design of free enterprise. Covid-19 is like George Soros and his band of currency traders, only that the former cannot be seen and wreaks planet-wide havoc.
Okay, enough of the base-economic and “Vladimir Lenin’s Commanding Heights” stuff I just threw into the mix of our discussion on the global-economic-matrix of the impact of Covid-19.
We were supposed to talk about this “human sacrifice” the current government is engaging in. By opening up too soon, so that money can be made. So that the workers, legal and illegal, can be called back to work. There are more than two million of them, whose fate we can no longer ascertain.
The recent raid on undocumented migrants is bringing us into the idea of what we wish to salvage as a nation. As a country still struggling to forge a better understanding amongst the Malays, Chinese, Indians, Orang Asli, Iban, Kadasan-Dusun, and others that have been here since before and after independence, as legal Malaysians.
Then the undocumented migrants arrived. By the hundreds of thousands. The addiction of the owners of the means of production to profit immensely through the system of modern-day slavery. Now we have got a major problem of what to do with them, when our economy had just nose-dived, tanked!
Millions of undocumented migrants hoping for jobs. Some 200,000 Rohingya refugees hoping for citizenship. Legal citizens hoping they will still have jobs. Graduates don't have a clue what awaits them. Government still thinking in the pre-Industry 4.0 paradigm. Chaotic thinking must be fixed. Now.
Post-Covid-19, each country must take care of her own citizens. The world has changed. Nationalism is back in popular demand. We are all economic beings, tied to the dictates of citizenship. No jobs anymore for undocumented migrants and hopeful refugees. New reality.
For Malaysia, having millions of undocumented migrants is not a good policy to develop her economy. Train the locals first. Fix our labour laws to meet the need of social regeneration and the goals of sustainability rather than think of making immense profits entirely. Herein lie the miseducation of the human rights activists, I sense.
In conclusion, I am writing this article on the “human sacrifice” on a national scale, poorly planned by the current government. A rush job inviting fatalities. It is May 6. We will know of the casualties of this war by June 6. Perhaps.
I hope we will not be another Italy.
Or the US.
In our haste to make money.
AZLY RAHMAN is an academician, international columnist and author of seven books available here. He holds a doctorate in international education development and Master’s degrees in six areas: education, international affairs, peace studies, communication, fiction and non-fiction writing. He is a member of the Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. Twitter @azlyrahman. More writings here. - Mkini
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