Ruminations on Covid 19, How you pose a problem and thinking in silos

Hi fellow Ruminants & Groupies in Lock Down

Originally circulated 17 April 2020

There has been a veritable tsunami of news and stories about Covid 19 and WhatsApp has been buzzing with news including wacky conspiracy theories. So you probably don’t need me weighing in on the topic but its Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™ so here goes:

The Covid 19 crisis is probably the biggest global crisis of all of our lifetimes. It has primarily been posed as a medical and epidemiological problem. A doctor’s job is to save lives and so doctors will rightly and understandably want to minimise the number of lives lost. No doctor wants to have to face the heart wrenching trauma faced by Italian doctors when their hospitals were overwhelmed and there were insufficient ICU beds. On a daily basis they had to triage patients and decide who would live and who would die. Doctors and epidemiologists want to do everything possible to reduce the death count. So we are trying to flatten the curve.

The problem is unfortunately not just a medical problem but intersects with economics, national and international politics, demographics and societal issues amongst others. My first reference is an Economist leader article entitled “A grim calculus: Covid-19 presents stark choices between life, death and the economy”. The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has declared that “We’re not going to put a dollar figure on human life.” https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/01/covid-19-presents-stark-choices-between-life-death-and-the-economy. Shutting the US economy will cause huge economic damage. Models suggest that letting covid-19 burn through the population would do less, but lead to perhaps 1m extra deaths. America is fortunate to be rich. In South Africa we are not so fortunate.

It is difficult to articulate the speed at which the US and the world has descended into an existential crisis. Life has been suddenly and dramatically upended, and, when things are turned upside down, the bottom is brought to the surface and exposed to the light. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/reality-has-endorsed-bernie-sanders#intcid=recommendations_default-popular_0eeed336-a6e1-4bc4-9b55-18c8f75daccc_popular4-1
As many as four in five Americans say they live pay check to pay check. Forty per cent of Americans say that they cannot cover an unexpected four-hundred-dollar emergency expense. In South Africa and other emerging nations the situation is far worse than America.

The effect of the COVID 19 crisis on emerging nations is explored by the Harvard Professor Ricardo Haussman. https://www.cde.org.za/ricardo-hausmann-covid-19-macro-economic-consequences-for-developing-countries/. He demonstrates that many emerging nations do not have the fiscal space to endure extended lock downs. His grim conclusion:

But a lockdown is not sustainable

At the limit, people will have to decide between a 10% chance of dying from the virus and a 100% chance of starving to death

This brings me to final reference relating to the consequences of the Coronavirus from someone from the wacky frontier, Charles Eisenstein.  https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/. He talks about the Corona virus providing an opportunity for more government control and less personal freedom. The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is overridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed. The ultimate fulfilment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself.

Please keep the submission ideas flowing.

Regards

Bruce