Opening up Malaysian schools soon? The young will bring the virus to the old at home. The oldest of the old will suffer the worst.
Malaysia might see a spike in infected Covid-19 a month after May 4. Learn from Singapore too. First, it was okay, then not okay. Is there enough testing done in Malaysia to reopen the economy? Are you in the government rushing through under an illusion and a nice numbers game? Let us frame this issue of reopening the economy to how the global economy itself is crashing down.
Young lives at risk
Will children in daycare wear full-bodied suits and masks all day and be forced into cubicles 6X6 feet to ensure maximum safety? Do children in daycare centres know about "physical distancing"? Isn't it better to still keep them at home for now? How do you ensure that caretakers at the centres are not carriers of Covid-19? Are these centres well-monitored to begin with?
O' Malaysians: Why risk the lives of the young (and old too) opening daycare centres now? And schools next, soon?
Children in daycares are the most difficult to take care of without the proper training of caretakers. With Covid-19? Three-quarter of the states in the US have closed schools until the end of the academic year in June. Daycares and pre-kindergartens are especially vulnerable.
The fear is that in a few weeks after May 4, Malaysia will become Singapore. We too have foreign workers, in fact, millions. Malaysian healthcare workers will have a tough time in a few weeks after May 4 following the rush to open. The virus does not care.
In Malaysia, it was reported the virus has mutated into a more dangerous strand. Fast and infectious. And you still want to open on May 4? Think!
Would parents dare send their kids to daycare centres and schools at this time? How many out of a million have the Malaysian government tested? To trumpet those nice numbers? In a conversation online, on Facebook, a Silicon-Valley, a California-based Malaysian-born surgeon and a dear friend of mine said:
“I don't think Malaysia has the virology capacity to detect any strains or mutations. Any test, regardless of how hi-tech or automated, requires a human skill component to it. Even a simple blood chemistry test could and had been bungled by a careless technician.
“For clinicians, it is common practice (in fact we would be considered negligent) if we do not repeat the test whose result is at variance with the clinical situation. There are endless reasons for false positives as well as false negatives. The challenge of interpreting screening tests or tests in asymptomatic individuals only compounds the difficulty...“
The Malaysian decision to open so soon is like Trump's America in their red states. Stop emulating the US without sufficient data.
Hypocrisy of Labour Day
The nation just celebrated Labour Day. In the year of the pandemic where the spectre of coronavirus is haunting the globe, as Marx and Engle’s would have put it in an updated and revised 2020 version of "The Communist Manifesto".
O’ Malaysians: On Labour Day don’t just talk about Marx and Das Kapital. Name your local capitalists - the owners of banks, airlines, plantations, tin mines, oil and gas companies, government-linked companies (GLCs) or the government-linked crony-economy.
Tell us who controls what and the nature of distributive justice, in a world of modern slavery. On Labour Day which labour will the Malaysian NGOs, socialists, wannabe-Marxists, Bangsar liberals champion? Foreign labour? In this post-Covid-19 era, send the illegals and refugees back to their homes. Start building a strong national economy using our own labour.
Bankers will protect their astronomical earnings, bonuses, what they cream off from lenders. They don't care, do they? Chiefs of GLCs are being paid "coronapoliticalload" of money to appease them politically, while the poor stay at home jobless. When we say the economy's bleeding and collapsing statistically, we are hearing the lamentation of the filthy rich.
It is as if, in the auditorium of the banking drama on moratoriums, the elite gets to go to the sanatorium and the people sent to the crematorium as bankers smoke opium.
Should companies with offshore accounts and foreign headquarters be helped by the government?
Migrant workers are now stuck with no jobs. Danger looms. Perhaps they should journey home and build their nations. Every country is in ruins now. Millions in the US have either lost their jobs or furloughed. Next, - immigration will be suspended to protect jobs for Americans. The condition in Malaysia should be no different.
Billionaires have become beggars to the poor, asking governments to bail them out, and governments wanting workers to get back to work in this time of the peaking Coronavirus outbreak. The poor will die by the millions but oil sheikhs are crying blood now. Oil, the black gold, like blood diamond, is now useless - the classic diamond-water paradox. Life continues to be precious.
Budget airlines holding customers' money for their own bailout, keeping refunds. UK-based Virgin Atlantic is going bankrupt as reported. Most of the world's airlines will be filing for bankruptcy soon.
These are the questions concerning the global economic collapse.
Society cannot pretend to get back to "normal", using the same paradigm that created a "world of normalcy that is abnormal. In post-Covid-19, the world might not turn socialist in toto, contrary to Marxist hopes. However, it might fuel other forms of crude liberal democracy and monopoly capitalism.
It might also lead to the next world war, be it with sticks & stones, as in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s cult movie "2001: A Space Odyssey"
Benjamin Franklin’s America - big business, big banks, monopoly capitalism - defeated Thomas Jeffersonian pastoral-agricultural-philosophical ideal. Today's America is Benjamin Franklin's. Today, Covid-19, with nature as its ally, is destroying Franklin's Paradise. Adam Smith, the grand wizard of classical economics too is weeping – seeing what the “invisible hand” has done to humans, the powerless human beings in face of a global health catastrophe!
Back to the changing reality of Malaysian politics. Enough of my musings on the butterfly effect of things, of the whirlpool and whirlwinds of the collapsing global economy and of the destruction and deconstruction of a new world order.
Meanwhile in Malaysia, here is our message - Malaysian elected officials, we want to see you live on Zoom in Parliament. Not on golf courses cutting deals and cutting grass. Come May 4, will the Malaysian Parliament, or the People's Daycare Centre, be open for political play too?
Save our children. Save our nation. Stay at home. We are not going back to the old normal.
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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