First, from my piece “Pandemic Diary of a Professor”,
We are tired of the very home that we used to rush towards every day after hectic work hours. The very homes that we hesitated to leave behind every morning is desperate to throw us outside as if it is also tired of us. Avoiding daily traffic and pollution was good for a couple of weeks. But as the lock down kept on getting extended for months, our natural thirst for warm, close, 3D and person to person interaction became as imminent ingredient for meaningful life as anything could ever be. The very driving we loathed, we are missing hardly.
Now, let me start the main body of my talk.
The fight between pandemics and human civilization is as old as human life itself. But, I think, this time we have treated COVID-19 slightly differently. We have let medical narration of the pandemic to dominate the entire spectrum of policy discussions. Forgetting or not giving enough space for political, economic, social and cultural narrative could be one of the biggest blunders of the developing part of the world such as South Asia. The question “Is/was the lockdown worth it?” is already in front of us.
In this sense, this webminar is a very welcoming step. Hopefully, we will be able raise voices loud enough to have real impact.
Negative news has a natural high demand among human consumers for survival instincts require being warry of a lion behind the noisy bush even if the possibility of one being there is almost none. We have natural tendency towards a fallacy that our golden age was in the past. We have forgotten how a population of 2 million ten thousand years ago has grown to 7 billion. It is estimated that there were 2000 individuals in London 50 thousand years ago. Try to fathom, how many thousands and hundreds of even deadlier pandemics they went through without knowing anything about their origin, the way they infected and the way they killed let alone knowing anything about the potential cure. We do not even have institutional memory of Black Death. Bubonic plague of 1665-6 ravaged London, killing more than 100,000 residents (25% of its population). Isaac Newton had to leave Cambridge and quarantine himself for two years in Woolsthorpe Manor, southeast of Nottingham, England.
Life expectancy at birth was 30-35 years across the globe mere 200 years back. Man’s natural age is not much different from that number. Now the average life expectancy at birth in Nepal is 70 years. In Japan, it exceeds 80 years.
COVID-19 also made people to fall to the conclusion of “science has failed” to understand the problems and come up with appropriate solutions. Think about our ancestors transitioning from Chimpanzee like creatures to modern Homo sapiens a million years ago. Did they know anything about global warming, climate change or pandemics or space travel? We figured out the germ theory of disease in late 1800s. It’s yesterday in the timescale of human evolution. If there is any hope (of course there is a lot of hope), it’s coming from labs and universities and nowhere else. Let us give science a tiny bit of gratitude it deserves for giving us vaccines against tetanus, whooping cough, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, small pocks. For saving billions of life, literally billions, by inventing anti-biotics.
Sustained upward progress is a modern phenomenon that started in 1800. For thousands of years the global output grew by the rate of 0.2% per year. It took 350 years to double the total output. Upturns in economic output due to healthy rainfall or benevolence of pests almost perfectly matched the downturns due to draught and wars. Confiscation of land and labour were thought to be one of the few methods to get wealthier. The real GDP per capita has been growing at an average rate of 3.5% in last 50-60 years, doubling our living standard every 20 years. In China, it doubled every 7-8 years in last couple of decades and in India it doubled almost 3 times since 1990. Bangladesh doubled it twice since 2000. Nepal has doubled it once since 2009.
But probably it is the first pandemic we have shut almost every facet of our life to save lives of our loved ones. This is a huge moral progress in a sense. We sacrificed hundreds of millions of jobs and several percentage points of GDP growth rate to save lives. People compare this pandemic to World War III. What an inaccurate and misleading comparison!! Have we forgotten world wars and genocides of twentieth century alone? Death of hundreds of millions of life by bombing and cold blooded massacre can never be compared with deaths by this pandemics. The world seems divided, but compared to what? Are we as divided as we were in World War II? Definitely not. But I do not deny the complexity of age old Trolley Problem here. The choice between death of a life vs destroyed life of a hundred thousand unemployed migrant workers is not an easy choice to make for policy makers.
Drawing inference about this pandemic and its effect in the long run progress trajectory we are on based on data from this pandemic alone is grossly inadequate at best. But if we are to learn anything from history, this will be a dent in the graph when we will look back a decade after it ends. I am not undermining the pain individuals and families are going through due to loss of loved ones and livelihood due to COVID-19. But it is highly likely that we are biased to think a lot more about gloom and doom when we are in the middle of a crisis like this.
It is worthwhile to remember Newton’s story here again. Newton’s major contributions to science and mathematics, the laws of motion and universal gravitation and creation of infinitesimal calculus has been traced back to those two years of quarantine in his life.
Nepal has one good case of how people get pass through painful disasters. The 7.8 Richter scale earthquake in 2015 killed almost 10 thousand lives in an instance and injured hundreds of thousands, and plunging economic growth into negative territory for the first time after almost three decades. Nepal has almost finished reconstruction process in five years’ time despite poor governance track record. Millions of stronger houses are built. Human beings are resilient creatures. They are good at overcoming difficulties and moving on.
Till now, Nepal is one of the least affected countries in South Asia, if not in Asia, by COVID-19. As of today, there are more than 5000 confirmed cases and 18 deaths were tested positive. In terms of economic growth, Nepal is expected to perform better than its immediate neighbours (1.8%). It has to be noted that the world output is falling at highest rate after the massive recession of Second World War.
It is bluntly and painfully obvious that the world could have been much better prepared to deal with the problem when we are hunting for alien life around other stars, driving rovers on mars with 20 minutes time lag in communication and genetic engineering rocks the scientific world every day with breakthroughs. Yes, this could be a major lesson learning opportunity for human civilization. It can prepare us a bit better to tackle the problem in future when even deadlier pandemics eventually hit us.
The lessons now.
Agriculture is going to be the least affected sector following industry and the service sector. Tourism, an important source of foreign currency, is the worst hit area in Nepal and South Asia. Migrant workers will be hardest hit. This will definitely force us to think about the nature of globalization we are embarking on. Cash crops will be hit hardest while as subsistence cereal farming will be affected the least. Now we realize why subsistence farming has endured and survived for thousands of years. It is insured against massive unpredictable crisis like this. It’s the right time to stop demeaning subsistence farming altogether. Vegetables are rotting and industrial milk production is suffering badly, but a subsistence farmer is in a much better position from a survival point of view. Going fully industrial has its limitations.
Developing countries need to revisit some of the strategies that they have adopted to counter the future pandemics.
First, let’s think about globalization. Going fully global has its own problems. But if this pandemic pushes us back to ultra nationalist and isolationist movement that would be the most disastrous lesson we would have learned. Yes, we should be producing enough ventilators and necessary goods in many other regions of the world. Yes we should not rely on everything on the other part of the world. Maybe we need to create many globes within a globe for trade and labour migration. Globes will trade among each other. Even more globalization might be needed in terms of research and information dissemination on issues like health. Containing a local pandemic should be a global priority.
Second, they have to better manage migration and effectively protect workers’ rights. If they cannot stay fed for 1 month without work where they have spent decades working honestly, then our system and moral compass must have failed them. If they have to go back to their mother’s place 10 days after being unemployed for safety and food, we definitely have failed our citizens. In addition to free trade, globalization of worker’s quality of life, free movement of labours across the borders should also get the emphasis.
Most importantly our systems should be able to produce micro livelihood opportunities in the very neighbourhood of our youths, where they are not forced to make a choice between economic progress and family warmth.
Third, our mass transit system seems to have totally failed to serve us during the pandemic. Unlike in Europe, we are unable to send our citizens back home safely and comfortably. It’s disheartening to see citizens walking for months to reach the ultimate safe place, their home. Almost a million Nepali citizens have returned home from India alone. The level of mismanagement on the both sides of the open border and the way we made them feel petty living in worst possible quarantine centres should shame us. They could have easily been kept at hotel rooms for 14 days before sending them to their destination. If our system cannot serve a million youths for 14 days who worked hard for their kids and parents for whole life, our system definitely needs a massive redesign.
Fourth, I wonder if copying and pasting of developed world style lockdown has served us. Definitely lives have been saved although the Trolley problem has gone nowhere. But due to lack of appropriate counterfactual, correct assessment of the usefulness of total economic and movement lockdown is an impossible task. Maybe we could have done better. Maybe we could have given at least 2-3 weeks for citizens to move back home. Maybe we could have kept our factories and farms running with adequate safety measures. Maybe.
Finally, we should be using our digital assets in a much better way. We are in need of working healthcare Management information system (HMIS); at least at regional level. Of course, we should be warry of authoritarian surveillance state in the name of having our private health information centralized. We should not ignore political narratives of the pandemic. We are in a dire need to be able to contain the pandemics when and where they emerge before they go global.
Finally, again from “Pandemic Diary of a Professor”,
As if the dark clouds of AI was not enough, the pandemic injects even more venomous fear of his ten thousand years old skill going obsolete sooner than later in a blink of an eye. Though there is no guarantee for the next pay check, a professor keeps dragging his professional cum personal life amidst the ever closer fear of pandemic reaching his doorsteps.
