How Covid-19 has become an economic threat?
The deadly pandemic, Corona Virus Disease or Covid-19 in short, caused by the New Corona Virus first detected in Wuhan, China sometime in December 2019, has for the first time rendered all governments of the world helpless and without any immediate solutions to effectively control the spread of the disease.
The new corona virus is too infectious and an infected individual even without any outward disease symptoms can easily infect others. Researchers have found that the virus spreads from the body fluids such as saliva, phlegm, mucus, etc that comes out from an infected individual during cough, sneeze, spit, etc and can remain in the air for a few minutes and on some moist surfaces for even a couple of days. The virus enters a new person through mouth, nose and eyes. Once the virus enters a new person the person is capable of transmission to others. However, the newly infected person develops symptoms of the disease after about 14 days only. The disease starts as common cold with the person experiencing headache, body pain, fever, difficulty to breath, cough, sneezing etc gradually and within a few days, in some cases become very severe with severe lung infection requiring intensive care with ventilator aid for breathing. For the majority people, the disease cures in another about 2 weeks and by this time the body becomes resistant to the virus and the person becomes corona negative. However, it has been now observed that about 1-13% infected people can succumb to the disease.
The pandemic has no effective medicines to treat as of now. Neither has it any vaccine that prevent its spread at present. Efforts to find medicines for its effective treatment and vaccines for preventing its spread are going on in different nations on a war footing. However, there is no surety of when those things become globally available.
All these things have made Covid-19 a new life threatening challenge to all governments and authorities of the world. The most developed nations of the world such as the USA, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, UK, etc are presently the worst sufferers due to this disease.
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There is hardly any nation now that has not been affected by this viral global epidemic except a few small island nations.
Fortunately, there exists laboratory testing methods to test the presence of corona virus in a person, though they are costly and time consuming. However rapid tests that are less expensive and quicker have also been developed and are made available in many countries.
Medical experts and virus researchers advice several measures for preventing the spread of the virus and the deadly disease. Forceful stay@home instructions coupled with full or partial economic shutdowns have been already implemented by most nations of the world now to prevent the virus from spreading at geometric progression rates. The world has never seen such a mass scale shutdown of human activities in its known history so far.
For the first time in the modern history of our world, all public transportation by all means have come to a stand still now. All religious gatherings in churches, mosques, temples and prayer halls are prevented. Excepting a few essential shops, all shopping centers, markets, etc are closed. Cities all over the world are practically deserted. No one living now has ever seen such a thing before!
The economic shut downs have been forced upon by the governments as a possible method to prevent the spread of the virus to uncontrollable levels. None of the governments had the time to think and implement more effective and practical methods. These steps, though have been thought of helpful in preventing the quick spread of the disease, have invariably also caused innumerable human miseries to thousands of people. As forceful shutdowns have been implemented for long duration in a very short notice, thousands of people got stranded worldwide without any means of getting back to their homes.
Almost all economic activities have almost come to a standstill. Though the governments are working hard to keep essential food and medicine supplies intact, it cannot be gauged as foolproof.
The economic shutdowns in many nations and places are on for more than two weeks now. Many authorities are contemplating extending the shutdowns further as Covid-19 has not come under any effective control so far. The infection and deaths are slowly rising!
Unfortunately, no one has come up with any other effective method other than economic shut down to tackle the corona virus, so far.
Under the present situation, there is no doubt, the measures adopted by the governments together with the pandemic have crippled the national and world economies to such levels than any one can think of. If the blanket economic shutdowns are forced ahead, billions of people in this world are destined to die of either Covid or starvation in the near future.
What can be done to prevent the collapse of the economy?
Whether Covid-19 is effectively reined by invention of effective medical methods or not, practical administrative methods with due thoughts need to be in place to prevent the economies to collapse to cause greater human miseries than that by the pandemic itself.
In other words, thoughtless shutdowns has to be ended and economic activities with effective safeguards must go hand in hand with other pandemic prevention activities.
Being a retired technocrat who had experienced handling of unforeseen emergency situations in large organizations in the past, though not of this kind, I feel that our experienced professionals in the government service can find effective methods of running the economy concurrently with steps of preventing corona virus spread, provided they are given time to think and plan properly.
My suggestions to the authorities are a few as given below:
1. Let not the police to create fear and panic in the society by over enthusiastic forcing of stay@home and economic shut downs. Let them be instructed to be logical in their acts of preventing crowd formation anywhere. Let them not terrorize individual citizens and families who are outside their residences moving or standing peacefully who have taken all practical steps to prevent virus infection such as safe distancing, wearing masks and the like.
2. Let all business organizations to do their respective business activities after they work out amendments in individual standard operating practices for all work procedures taking care of corona virus infection prevention strictly. Let the business organisation be held responsible for any spread of virus in their workforce attributable to unsafe work practices.
3. Let the authorities allow all loading, unloading and transport of all goods by all transport means by taking due precautions while doing these activities. Let the authorities approve and monitor standard operating practices for safe goods handling on a case to case basis as prepared by professional experts.
4. Let online retailers and their delivery associates do their jobs according to approved safe operating practices.
5. Let production centers, factories and service providers be allowed to function after implementing safe operating practices.
6. Let the authorities examine, approve and monitor the safe operating practices of all economic activities in their respective jurisdiction.
7. Let the authorities take steps to avoid all kinds of crowd formation any where including religious or entertainment venues.
8. Let public and private transports like commercial flights, trains, buses, trucks, ships etc be allowed to function with due care in sanitation and preventing crowding and social contacting in a restrictive manner as per well defined procedures. Let the fares be raised during the restrictive period to take care of the economic viability.
9. Let hospitals be segregated for infectious and non infectious diseases by carefully modifying hospital management systems of all health care facilities. Let all healthcare facilities be periodically checked for corona virus infections.
10. Quarantine all infected and possibly infected individuals strictly either at their homes or at specified medical facilities till they are certified negative for corona virus.
11. Let currency and cash transactions be strictly curtailed to the minimum possible levels. Let money transactions be through contact less digital payment methods like Paytm or internet banking where need for handling currency of cards or public machines are totally avoided. Authorities to make rules for such payment methods simpler by modifying their respective KYC norms etc to practically possible levels instead of the stringent impractical methods as existing at present (e.g. requirements of physical verification of documents should be dispensed with)
12. All employees who can do their work through internet and by telephone by sitting at home should be allowed to do so by all organisations.
13. All construction activities must be allowed by taking due precautions in people to people contacts.
14. All agricultural activities must be allowed by properly educating the people about safe practices.
15. On line medical consultancy and medicine supply should be encouraged and implemented.
16. All organisations including governmental may be allowed to cut salaries of their top paid employees who draw more than five times the emoluments of their lowest paid employee appropriately if the organization is financially constrained. In a similar way governments may think of reducing highly paid pensions and enhance the pensions of people who avail very low pensions not sufficient to make a living.
17. Governments to allow all business houses with tax arrears to pay those later in easy installments in case the financial position of the firm or company has deteriorated due to covid-19 shut down.
18. Governments should allow banks and financial institutions to allow moratorium on loan re-payments to individuals and firms on a case to case basis in case the individual or firm is constrained financially due to covid-19 related shut downs or job loss.
19. Governments should allow financial grants or loans to business firms that are willing to restart the lost businesses on account of the shut downs.
There could be many more such things that the authorities can think and implement to overcome the economic collapse on account of the present pandemic emergency.
What I wanted to highlight is the importance of eliminating panic measures without due thinking by the authorities.
Even a vehicle when braked suddenly without due care and thinking can cause much destruction and havoc even when it is done to save a life!
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