Day Fourteen

Physical Distancing crumbled before the vegetable seller today. Some people even lifted their facemasks to speak. A terrible trailer of things to come if the lockdown is lifted on 15th. It now worries me more than the imposition of lockown 2 weeks ago. Amma is eagerly looking forward for the lockdown to be lifted on 15th. How do I tell her that she can forget stepping out in 2020?

But the lockdown has to be lifted; the economy cannot be allowed to collapse. It has to be a tradeoff between the collapse of economy and exposing the vulnerable sections of the population to the virus. Countries are continuously finetuning epidemiological models to predict how and when they can end the lockdown and minimise the damages. Read an excellent article on this in the current issue of Economist. 

The huge costs of shutting down a significant fraction of the economy will increase with time. 

People’s willingness to abide by restrictions depends both on their sense of self-preservation and on a sense of altruism. As their perception of the risks the disease poses both to themselves and others begins to fall, seclusion will irk them more.

There is also a worry that, the longer the economy is suppressed, the more long-lasting structural damage is done to it. Older workers may be less inclined to move or retrain, and more ready to enter early retirement. Such “scarring” would make the losses from the restrictions on economic life more than just a one-off: they would become a lasting blight.

In the end, just as lockdowns, for all that their virtues were underlined by the modellers’ grim visions, spread around the world largely by emulation, they may be lifted in a similar manner. If one country eases restrictions, sees its economy roar back to life and manages to keep the rate at which its still-susceptible population gets infected low, you can be sure that others will follow suit.