Jeremy Gordin’s “The dark at the end of the lockdown tunnel” (Politicsweb 16 April) proves again what an entertaining writer he is- fun to read and good for a laugh, as always. But for deeper insight into the aetiology and panacea for this COVID 19 pandemic, one needs to look elsewhere.
His critique of Dr Zweli Mkhize, Minister of Health, and Prof Abdul Karim, a world-renowned epidemiologist, is that they don’t engage adequately with the economic implications of lockdown. However, they don’t deny that there are such implications, but that they don’t factor them into their decision making and advice, respectively. Now Jeremy Gordin is, as I acknowledge above, a consummate writer. But it is churlish to accuse him of not understanding the total complexity of the pandemic. But on one issue he is horrifyingly wrong.
When Prof Karim says that the lockdown is buying time, it does not imply that we may as well do nothing and wait for it all to pass and bury the dead while we get on with the economy. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson tried that one and look where that got them. What Prof Karim means, and this is obvious in his presentation, is that lockdown and the extension buys time to put in place measures that will save lives and reduce the burden on the health care system, public and private, as well as the economy.
Lockdown has negative economic consequences, but it also enables the medical profession as a whole to prepare for the worst to reduce the overall negative impact of the pandemic in South Africa. The costs of providing health care, the costs of managing high mortality rates, the emotional and financial costs to the families who remain behind after loved ones have passed away and the cost to the economy of large numbers of managers and workers dying. Mitigation of all of these variables is not only moral, but economically sensible.
But Jeremy Gordin, after all, is no epidemiologist and not an economist of note either. But he is a good writer. Dr Mkhize and Prof Karim are medical practitioners and experts in this field. They, too, are not economists of note. So, why should they be criticized for not being economically omniscient when their expertise lies elsewhere.
The decision making on lockdown occurs in an environment where multiple factors - pandemic, health care, socio-economic and economic – are considered by a committee where all the areas of relevance are brought together. This is where the rubber hits the tarmac. How do you decide what to do when there are negative consequences to everything you decide to do? You balance costs and benefits, taking all the information available at the time, into account. The Economist refers to this as a “grim calculus”.