Coronavirus lockdown: Domino chain we can’t comprehend in advance
A lockdown seems a beguilingly simple thought. It should be easy enough to grasp as a concept—even if, as we saw during Sunday’s informal Janata curfew, people interpret it in alarmingly contrary and self-defeating ways! But that came about as the observance of an advisory from the prime minister: it was not law yet. A real lockdown is mandated and enforced by official fiat. Empty roads, empty rails, empty skies. We will all need to brace—the decision-makers and the general public—for the million little effects it will set off in our society and economy.
A domino chain that we cannot comprehend in advance. Nor will the logistical exigencies leave us. For instance, how to ramp up, on an emergency basis, India’s abysmal supply of critical care: 2.3 ICU beds per a lakh population. Yes, a lockdown is an extreme measure meant to thwart a scenario where our system collapses under the pressure—Italy did, and even the UK (6 per lakh) is presently struggling.
Meanwhile, we must contemplate the full spectrum of effects it entails. Of a billion businesses and livelihoods hitting an unforeseen pause button, without any shock buffer. A moment of reckoning, in a sense, that it is additionally recessionary. In all of free India’s crises—famine, drought, flood, supercyclone, tsunami—we have never had to battle things with the country’s entire infrastructure on a ventilator, with zero mobility. (Thank heavens for the digital communication backbone we have now.)
Then there’s the human aspect. Despite our youthful demographic dividend, which can be kept happy with TikTok, we are also an increasingly geriatric country. Millions of old people, living alone, are now thrown into a never-before experience of isolation. Where do their needs get met, who cares for them? It is time for citizens’ initiatives—like the excellent Care-mongers—to fill the breach where the state cannot reach.