Part 1 Covid-19 and lockdowns
THE movie “I Am Legend” comes to mind as one of the alternative “end of times” scenarios. I quote its synopsis: “Years after a plague kills most of humanity and transforms the rest into monsters, the sole survivor in New York City struggles valiantly to find a cure in this post-apocalyptic action thriller.” Movies have a way of predicting the possible outcomes of a given hypothesis. What limits or unlocks the universe of possibilities is simply the imagination — either infertile or vivid — of the author or the screenwriter from which the movie is adapted.
Films are also reflections of man’s hopes and fears writ large with the audience vicariously involved, safe within the confines of dark cinemas or home theaters. But audiences demand that at the end, there must be a redeeming value or at the very least a deux ex machina that restores order — a universal karma that must overarch the lives of men.
What is eerie is that the current Covid-19 mimics the plot of the movie, giving credence to the “reality follows fiction” dictum. Only the finale has not yet been scripted. Will the world find a cure — a vaccine — in time to save humanity? Reality’s final intent has still to unfold.
Panacea
A vaccine to cure or immunize the population may be available in 18 months. Meantime, China, the world’s newly minted benefactor will have to work its factories double time to produce the much-needed medical supplies and equipment for the hospitals. And there is fear of a second deadly wave, as China’s labor force breaks quarantine. Prognosis for each country is imprecise. Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are expected to “flatten their curves,” but not Italy or Spain. They will be decimated. When China or the United States makes the scarce vaccine available, Western Judeo-Christian countries or China’s allies may have priority. The impoverished countries in the fringes and in the Middle East be damned. And how do you think the Islamic world will react? The permutations are endless, but Darwin’s law of natural selection will kick in — which simply means, the fittest will survive; a logical complement to the hypothesis that results in a Malthusian catastrophe.” (“Covid-19 conspiracy theories,” The Manila Times, April 1, 2020.)
The slums of Asia and India, the favelas of Latin America, and the shanty towns of Africa may be written off. They are unable to quarantine themselves seriously as this is not the priority for the poor and the “dregs of society.” And social or physical distancing is alien not only to their culture but the realities of their lives. Multi-families live in shacks and hovels.
And the jobs and food situation for survival need to be included in the calculus. There will be practically a few of the former and not enough of the latter. Hunger will descend and, perhaps, starvation and famine not unlike the intermittent years that hit the Sahel region and sub-Saharan Africa in 1968 to 2016 or North Korea from 1994 to 1998. Admittedly this extremely grim scenario belongs more to the movie disaster genre. Reality most probably will fall along the alternative route.
Point of departure
Where are we today, four-and-a-half months after the first contagion and subsequent first death was reported? As we go to press, we have 2.2 million to 2.5 million cases, with 150,000 deaths and rising. That’s 0.002 percent of the world population of 7.7 billion — minuscule compared to an estimated 0.01 percent to 5.56 percent deaths in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Hysteria and terror are the handmaidens of fear. And we have been flagellated by an amalgam of facts, fiction and fake news underpinned by ignorance, precluding us from facing lucidly monsters we ourselves created. Although Covid-19 grew exponentially in four months, the protocols on quarantine, physical distancing and health practices have begun to “flatten the curve” in some countries. But America, remiss in its role as the world’s hegemon, is now the epicenter of Covid-19. But experts have reduced morbidity projections from a high 240,000 to 60,000. Still a tragic figure compared to 9/11’s 3,000 dead that triggered two American wars and untold misery. In other countries, Covid-19 is still raging, but country-to-country assessment differs — depending on how survival protocols are enforced.
World economy
I borrow heavily from Fareed Zakaria’s reportage, a journalist of global renown on the state of the world’s economy that we are just at the “early stages of what is going to become a series of cascading crises.” And we are not going back to anything resembling normal — a position that Adam Tooze, a British historian and an eminent academic agreed with. “The old economic and political playbooks don’t apply,” he declared. The healthcare crisis is only the first phase that brought the world’s leading economies on their knees. Long profligate, the world’s governments and their desire to uplift the lives first of their elite and the overclass, then their masses, perhaps as an afterthought, produced a wealth gap between the “haves and the have nots” that caused the government and private sectors to be mired in debt. Credit Suisse estimates that the world’s richest 1 percent now owns half the world’s wealth. This is the “old normal.” Do we want to revert to that? And the global gross domestic product is $90 trillion, adding $260 trillion in public and private debt.
Many of the leading countries were caught naively unprepared, including America. It has lost 17 million jobs and on track for 30-percent unemployment. The next phase will be the debt crunch, with leading countries defaulting on their loans precipitating a fiscal breakdown. Italy, the third largest European economy is toast; it can no longer rely on Germany, its ‘go-to’ banker to tide it over. Germany, the strongest European economy, is expected to contract by more than 5 percent to start with.
Middle East and oil countries
The price of oil, the lifeblood of the industrialized nations and its main source of energy, is on a free fall, its demand having collapsed, settling perhaps at $10 per barrel. Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries Will have lakes of unsold oil. Below $60 per barrel, oil becomes unprofitable, and government revenue will dry up, sinking the economies of Libya, Nigeria, Iran and Iraq. And this will lead to instability and political turmoil, and massive shift of immigrants and refugees inundating borders.
Endgame
The knee-jerk palliative of a lockdown to contain, then mitigate the contagion saved lives. But there is a trade-off on the country’s economic life, which will also impact negatively on people’s lives, prompting reversal. Of note is South Korea and China itself, where incidences of contagion have eventually abated and lockdowns have been lifted. US President Donald Trump, who irresponsibly refused to enforce lockdowns resulting in countless American lives lost, is now disingenuously shifting blame to state governors for his criminal incompetence. He backtracked on his earlier assertion that as president, he is in total control over the states. His insistence still on a three-phased reopening of the US economy before November smacks of brazen politicking, an eye toward sanitizing his reelection bid.
Next week: Part 2 Economic recovery
