On March 2, when we were still awakening to COVID-19, I suggested that the world’s response to the novel coronavirus was an extreme example of a transfer of wealth from the young to the old.
Back then China was part-way through its brutal lockdown of Wuhan; the Diamond Princess had become a floating prison; and the elderly were being hit hard in Italy. Much of the world was still largely blissful in ignorance.
Eight months later and most of the world has in some way locked down their populations for a period of time. As millions of people around the world lost their jobs, billionaires increased their wealth by 27.5% between April and July. The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, increased his wealth by a staggering US$74 billion, helped in part by governments forcing Amazon’s competitors to close.
While the rich have gotten much richer, the poor have unsurprisingly gotten far poorer. Last week the World Bank estimated that 150 million people will be forced into poverty by the end of 2022. The number of people who are subsisting on only US$1.90 per day is expected to increase from 9.1% to 9.4% of the world’s population.
Of course, the rich have also been able to deal with lockdowns far more comfortably. In late March, billionaire David Geffen sent words of support, imploring regular people to stay safe, from a US$590 million yacht.
The Queensland government, which refuses to ease strict 14-day quarantine rules for normal people suffering from cancer, happily allows wealthy celebrities like Danni Minogue and Tom Hanks to avoid hotel quarantine and stay in alternative luxury accommodation.
In Melbourne, proud home to one of the world’s longest lockdowns, Bernard Salt — the millionaire KPMG partner and demographer — yesterday wrote a treatise in The Australian explaining just how lovely his lockdown experience has been.
Bernard has been able to stroll the streets of his leafy suburb and admire the “beauty in a microcosm of Melbourne suburbia [while connecting] the passage of time, the change of seasons, the angle of the sun, with the concept that there is a bigger canvas upon which we play out the minutiae of our lives”.
This is not to criticise Salt, who himself grew up in a housing commission property and who said nothing intentionally offensive, but to contrast his experience with the hundreds of thousands of Victorian small business owners who have been legally prevented from earning a living since April. Or the Flemington housing commission residents who upon a mere one hour’s notice were imprisoned in their tiny apartments for more than a week. Their crime, it seemed, was being poor and not white. (The Labor government gave Melbourne’s wealthy several days before stage-four restrictions to head to their Mornington Peninsula holiday homes.)
Yesterday, the World Health Organization (WHO) conceded what has become very apparent to anyone with a basic understand of mathematics: lockdowns cause more harm than good.
One of the world’s foremost health experts, the WHO’s Dr David Nabarro, told leaders to end “using lockdowns as your primary control method … lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer”.
In March I wrote that “so far, around 3000 people have died from COVID-19. However, in 2017, more than 800,000 kids aged under five died from lower respiratory infections. Another 600,000 young kids died from diarrheal diseases; more than 350,000 died from malaria; and shockingly, 145,000 died from nutritional deficiencies. Those are figures from just one year”.
The novel coronavirus has traversed the globe, sucking up trillions of dollars in resources as we continue to lock down regions and try to find vaccines and treatments. If only we responded that way when poor, black kids get sick.
Good article up to the point where you said ‘lockdowns cause more harm than good’. This is an absolute statement about all circumstances. In fact the article you reference (which is itself hostile to lockdowns) quotes the WHO spokesman as saying “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
And that is fair enough. Lockdowns as the original response to Covid19 made sense in that governments generally did not know what they were dealing with or more often were simply unprepared.
However at this stage a lockdown is seen as an admission of failure. I can’t find the article referencing Israel, but it talked about the Netanyahu government’s failure to seriously address ongoing infections leading to an upsurge in infections and now a second lockdown.
Governments that are serious about dealing with Covid19 (so not USA or Brasil) need to have localised responses that test, trace and track infections and develop local responses rather than all of population responses. It all needs to be competent – an issue in Victoria and perhaps NSW. The issue with these techniques is whether the governments have a social license to do this effectively – meaning will people cooperate and comply with localised activity that disadvantages the few rather than the many. The USA is an example of what happens when there is no social license – due to a range of cultural, political and economic factors.
The favourable treatment of the rich compared to others undermines social acceptance of targeted approaches in favour of equality of suffering. And a lockdown if nothing else creates a higher degree of equality of suffering than other approaches.
Agree, WHO’s Nabarro said ‘primary control method’ which does not preclude lock downs, but part of a mix of measures.
His message has been distorted and promoted by ‘libertarian’ view including news.com.au piece truning up internationally, amongst other proponents of no lock downs.
Much of the Anglo world of US, UK and Australia seem to miss the importance of testing, testing, testing so they can test the effectiveness of measures taken.
The biggest failure here is really our current economic system and outdated and/or corrupted mindsets of many (mostly “conservative”) governments.
Ahhh, Schwabby. You’re getting better. But you’ll need to start paying attention to facts. If you’re going to lie about Queensland, I’m going to call you on it. Let me rewrite it for you: “The Queensland government, which refused to ease strict 14-day medical hotel quarantine rules for normal people suffering from cancer until he provided the requested information, happily allows film companies to provide separate hotels for their cast and crew under strict covid-safe industry plans, thus keeping distractions away from regular travellers in hotel quarantine.” … except once it’s rewritten with the truth, it’s not much of a sentence, is it?
… That reminds me, cherry season’s not far away.
But so many of them have already been picked before they were ripe!
…. With alimentary historical consequences.
The point about the lockdowns is that reducing the spread is as much to protect our frontline medical staff and prevent the hospital system from over loading, as it is to prevent the spread. Do you know a medical worker in a hospital? Ask them if they agree with the lock down. Secondly, I agree if businesses are forced to be shut down fore the community to benefit, they should be compensated, including arts and events workers. It isn’t their fault they can’t work so they should be paid to not work. Then the clamour to open up to the detriment of us all would cease.