It’s happening all over the world; the struggle to decide whether countries should stay the course of preventative Coronavirus and Covid-19 health protocols and restrictions or abandon them and try to find different, presumably better, ways and means, of living with this emergency health pandemic, and where does Botswana stand in all this scrambling for alternative possibilities of dealing with the plague?
Is there a rational and sustainable course to living with this pandemic? Is it wise for countries to end Covid-19 emergency declarations, including in some cases, decommissioning Covid-19 data tracking tools like the state of Iowa did last Thursday; in short giving the whole pandemic nightmare the middle finger: “Iowa is moving past the pandemic and will manage Covid-19 like other infectious illnesses?” report Axios a day later.
Really? Yes, really, and the Governor is reported saying, “We cannot continue to suspend duly enacted laws and treat Covid-19 as a health emergency indefinitely,” in a press release.
It’s not only Iowa. This trend and attitude are gaining ground and momentum in Europe, and in Britain, Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, actually imposed this direction in the management of the pandemic in an impromptu parliamentary debate.
Are the politicians right? Is this good health policy in the face of a murderous plague that in many ways is still evolving, is still unmanageable, is still wrecking health systems, is killing people, is still damaging economic growth, is responsible for declining democratic governance, and the rise of authoritarian attitudes and practices in many parts of the world, and the reduction of livelihood opportunities for citizens, especially in poor regions of societies and the world at large?
Yes, the health restrictions and precautions in place are burdensome, they are inconvenient and uncomfortable, but since when is critical health management, especially a plagued-pandemic, easy, convenient and comfortable?
What happens when a new and fire-speed variant, unresponsive to existing Covid-19 vaccines, and this is really a matter of when, hits us unprepared, and unprotected, overnight, what then? Will our health systems and economies respond better? Will our governments respond better? Will citizens agree to returning to lockdown restrictions and masks, previously despised and abandoned by our own leaders?
In short, isn’t this strategy “to live with the pandemic” only stoking rebellion by fuelling complacent disregard for scientific response and clinical management of the pandemic unencumbered by the hysterics political interference? I know the argument behind this change of attitude and pandemic policy. We are told vaccination rates are high in local settings where this is happening. That people are boosted. That freedoms and liberties are in peril. That governments are over-reaching. That people cannot keeping injecting vaccine doses in their arms indefinitely.
Valid political and economic arguments; but what is the use of good politics and economics after you are dead, or when your loved ones, neighbours and colleagues start dying again?
Who do you blame then?
Let’s remember a few realities, and we don’t have to agree on this; arguments about these things now belong to the past, initial governments’ response, often authoritarian, but for the most part simply pragmatic, was to protect human lives and avoid heavy hospitalizations that could cripple health systems, to provide economic relief and social protection in the face of emerging economic stagnation, to combat mass disruptions of public life and security in the face of possible political paralysis, and to deal directly with the destructive and other effects of the health disaster, including vaccine development.
We have been two years at the crossroads with this pandemic.
Maybe it is time we designed new protective measures suited to this phase of the struggle against the pandemic, thanks, in large, to vaccination interventions, and political commitment to pandemic mitigation by the WHO, national governments and civil society organizations. But are we doing this the right way? Why, for example, abandon scientific direction? Why not keep on working on better, more effective, and more efficacious vaccines? Why not send more vaccines and boosters to poor countries where vaccination rates are terribly low, and school children between the ages of 4-10 cannot, for the first time since the end of colonial rule, read or write, or even identify images on classroom boards because of disastrous emasculation of school infrastructure, deaths of teachers, closure of schools and fears of Covid-19 infections these past two years?
Shouldn’t the new response to the Covid-19 pandemic now in this second phase be a determined and committed and equitable and just vaccination of the whole world, coupled with serious and concerted, and scientific consolidation of health mitigation and treatment in Western countries where so much success has been accomplished these past many months of vaccination?
