The Road They Took

It was just a couple of months back that China locked down Wuhan, the point of origin and epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic. To almost everyone outside China, it felt like a brutal measure. The West smirked: it was just the kind of response a communist government would undertake. No free society would tolerate such measures, they said. Strangely, the West hardly anybody paid attention to South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore who took similar measures, along with a lot of random testing to gauge the extent to which the virus had spread/was spreading. And as the virus seemed to come under control in those countries, the West didn’t bother to check if the measures (lockdown and random testing) were instrumental in how the situation had played out in those countries.

To be fair, the West had reason to be confident. Previous outbreaks like SARS and H1N1 were contained, and barely spread to the West. And the GHS index that tracks global health security measures to deal with pandemics and epidemics put the West at the top (USA – 1, UK – 2, Netherlands – 3, Australia – 4, Canada – 5, Sweden – 7, France – 11, Germany – 14, Spain – 15, and Italy – 31).

And where were the Asian countries in the rankings? South Korea – 9, Japan – 21, Singapore – 24, China – 51, and India – 57.

And then the virus hit Europe. Italy suddenly became the new epicenter for the virus, with Spain not far behind. Today, the US, Germany and France have all gone past China in number of cases. And they’re still growing, none of them has been able to “flatten the curve” (the per day rise in cases is not coming down).

India was lucky to see both trends before the virus hit us hard, and the data was overwhelming - Countries that went into lockdown were the only ones that got this under control. So that’s the course we took.

The more I think of it, the more I wonder if the East and the West decided on the “To lockdown or not to lockdown” question on an ideological basis - the West values every individual whereas the East is more willing to sacrifice the individual for the collective. Wouldn’t such harsh restrictions infringe on individual freedom? Is it OK to risk job losses and money problems for so many? Wasn’t even logistically possible to ensure essential supplies be available to all? Would people obey a lockdown? Or would the army have to be pulled in?

The West decided individual freedom was too important, whereas the East decided the opposite. So far, the East seems to have chosen correctly. But here’s the deal: even if the virus spreads like wildfire in the East at a later date, at least they’d have slowed down the spread upto some point of time, thereby buying them time to formulate other policies with thought and deliberation.

The West, on the other hand, is in reactive mode and being forced to compromise on several of their values: one can already see Western regulatory agencies fast-tracking the clearances for new ventilators. Even if they accelerate the production of ventilators, would they have enough qualified medical staff to operate those many new machines? Will that be the area where standards will be diluted next? And in their desperation for a vaccine, will they dilute their usual rigour of testing for side-effects? Ed Yong termed America’s response “rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated”, but doesn’t that apply to the entire West?

And the initial studies seem to show that the Wuhan measures were necessary:

“We find, using simulations with these estimates, that the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020 contributed significantly to reducing the total infection cases outside of Wuhan, even with the social distancing measures later imposed by other cities. We find that the COVID-19 cases would be 64.81% higher in the 347 Chinese cities outside Hubei province, and 52.64% higher in the 16 non-Wuhan cities inside Hubei, in the counterfactual world in which the city of Wuhan were not locked down from January 23, 2020.”

And:

“We also find evidence that enhanced social distancing policies in the 63 Chinese cities outside Hubei province are effective in reducing the impact of population inflows from the epicenter cities in Hubei province on the spread of 2019-nCoV virus in the destination cities elsewhere.”

To me, all the evidence suggests that the measures we’ve taken in India are necessary. Having chosen the right course, we must stay the course from here onwards.