Lockdown versus No Lockdown #covid #coronavirus #lockdown #sweden #southkorea #canada #economy

Lockdown versus No Lockdown
Hemant Batra, Hemant K Batra, Mentor Talk, #HemantBatra, #MentorTalk

According to industrialist Rajiv Bajaj, the way India has been locked down is a draconian lockdown. This kind of lockdown, he has not heard about from anywhere else. Then he goes on to say that this lockdown has definitely decimated the economy. And has flattened the wrong curve. That is not the infection curve, but the GDP curve.

Even I had a doubt once about the lockdown strategy when I had seen Sweden not going in for lockdown. At that time I did a video talk as well on Sweden – Not locked down. But then I started doing comparative studies and analysis. And here is what I found whereby I feel that India did absolutely right in going in for locked down otherwise we would have lost both enormously - massively the lives and economy.

Sweden chose for a more open approach in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic than other European countries, but at present it has seen an upsurge in the number of deaths per capita which is highest in Europe on a per capita basis and even above the United Kingdom and is sitting at the brink of recession. One doctor, there has actually accused the Swedish government of playing “Russian roulette” with the people. Majority of Swedish experts are advocating lockdown. Deaths in Sweden have been higher than in neighbouring Scandinavian countries.

Sweden did not impose lockdown during the pandemic believing that there will be less economic distress. But the most recent data demolishes that belief.
Sweden which is Scandinavia’s biggest economy will shrink 7 per cent this year. This is as per their Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson.

Sweden is not the only example, South Korea battled the COVID-19 pandemic with no lockdown and it is seeing significant job losses no different than the countries that enforced lockdown.

Even Canada had not imposed lockdown absolutely all across. What happened to their economy. Well, the research study conducted by economists from the Seoul’s Myongji University, Queen Mary University of London and St. Louis’s Washington University, has concluded that Canada’s economy may not go back completely to normalcy so long Covid 19 stays around.
Most job losses have not occurred due to lockdown but from lack of hiring by businesses and a considerable volume of non-participation in the labour market, people do not want to step out and endanger their lives. The said economists have concluded, “The best way to revive the labour market is to eradicate the virus,”. So we can't blame the economy having suffered because of a lockdown or no lockdown.

Here I will also like to quote the same study which attempted to unravel the several distinct reasons in respect of unemployment. In the context of South Korea, it cited a notorious event that spiked the transmission rate in the country. In mid-February, the country had only 30 COVID patients, but this person who eventually became “Patient 31” attended a religious gathering. Ten days later, the country had more than 3,000 infections almost entirely clustered around where he had attended the gathering. More than 60 per cent of them were traced back to that single gathering.

So, this simple real-life example demonstrates that lockdown does arrest spread of this deadly virus and economic recession is going to be a challenge either way so it is better to save lives than lose everything. If you have the life you can revive or rebuild everything again. As they say, if money is gone something is gone if health is gone everything is gone.