Times Of Swaziland: MAKING SENSE OF LOCKDOWN

MAKING SENSE OF LOCKDOWN
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The Editor on 17/09/2020 01:26:00


Sir,
In case anybody hasn’t noticed, the world is in turmoil. If you are religious,
this shouldn’t come as a surprise because many religious texts mention great
upheavals taking place as we approach the end of the age.
Racism and intolerance are on the increase, erratic weather continues to cause
havoc, corruption has become normal and, of course, a certain virus has brought
such profound changes which nobody thought possible even a year ago.
With a few exceptions, we have seen most of the world go into lockdown, dragging
economies down in the process, to try and slow the spread of the virus – which
has since spread throughout the world.
Perhaps for the first time in recorded history, people of all faiths were
prevented from going to their places of worship – globally – supposedly to
prevent the spread of the virus, but the reality is that, the virus is already
present in every country.
I may be far from being an expert on infectious diseases, but I think that the
most effective solution to combat the spread of the virus would have been to
isolate it to the country where it originated by imposing a travel ban on people
travelling to and from there (which didn’t happen) and to immediately screen
and perhaps quarantine those people who had recently travelled to and from there
(which obviously also didn’t happen).
Survive
Of course nations cannot survive by being economically strangled, and now
economies are beginning to reopen because we now supposedly have the situation
under control.
In fact infections are even supposedly declining in some countries, despite the
fact that people are no longer under lockdown, which brings us to our situation
here in Eswatini; perhaps the only country where alcohol remains banned, also
supposedly to slow down the infection rate.
Is it possible that countries listened to the ‘science’ concerning the use
of face masks, but all the other countries decided to ignore the ‘scientific
evidence’ which shows a correlation between alcohol consumption and new
infections by continuing to allow the sale of alcohol.
Granted, stopping new infections is forward thinking, and I think that everybody
appreciates their governments’ efforts to try and stop the spread of the
virus, but growing economies also require forward thinking (and lots of time),
and by simply allowing economies to collapse in a bid to slow transmissions of a
virus which does not require a vaccine to have an over 90 per cent recovery rate
doesn’t make any sense.
In fact, where there are poor performing economies, there is also high
unemployment and poverty rates, and where there is poverty, there is a high
prevalence of preventable diseases which claim thousands of lives.
LiSwati citizen
Mbabane