Daniel Thwaites | Pon de River, Pon de Bank

Last week’s column generated its fair share of responses, and as usual, there’s a lot of chaff mixed in with some wheat. I argued for a quick and thorough lockdown. The most searching replies have had to do with whether we’ve already blown the opportunity to lock down, whether the economic pain of a serious-enough lockdown would precipitate unbearable agony and social disorder, and whether an alternative model is right for our peculiar circumstances and livity.

I’m going to explore those in a bit.

I also pointed out that the Government has botched some key elements of the response. The communication has been well done, but the testing regime has been pitiful, managing the quarantine of incoming travellers has been haphazard, and the St Catherine lockdown was a fiasco! The stimulus package has been ultimately negligible.

Also, there are some background conditions that make one seethe. We’ve had chronic underinvestment in the health facilities worsened by the politicisation of the likkle user-fees. Memba dat?

Closer to right now, although Government was put on notice from back in December about COVID-19, no travel restrictions or quarantine was put in place, probably because of playing footsie with the tourism bosses.

Here’s a big one. Ready? Lest we forget, there was contemptuous dismissal of every warning to DO NOT TAKE DOWN AND USE the big elephant gun of states of emergency (SOE), such that it becomes mundane and routinised, and so that when you really need it, it’s not really there – 84.7 per cent of the value of the SOE is in shock and awe. So what happens when the administration spent that already?

Tightrope walk

Hey, how about the ex post facto redub and re-explanation and respin of a budget which is now spoken of as having stimulus for COVID-19? Not so fast. Coronavirus preparation was an obvious ‘add-on’. I’m sure all the gaiety of ‘jook dem wid de 1.5’ was meant to go viral another way, but something else came bubbling up.

Anyway, the Government is now performing a difficult tightrope walk between rising infections and sickness, limited healthcare facilities, a flammable and combustible society with a rickety security framework, and finally, a fragile economy that was just now trying to graduate from creeping along on all fours to its first few tentative baby steps.

I hope and pray these fellows are up to the task. In fact, this is where a slightly touchy subject has to be addressed. It’s about the fact that ‘ah Anju mi ah seh!’ right now. We are all behind Brogad on this one. I mean to the point where I get up every night and open up my windows and doors to feel safe.

But it can’t be leadership by sweet-talking press conferences. Remember Action Ann’s irrefutable point. “Pretty talking don’t put water inna pipe”. Pretty talkin don’t kill virus either.

Also, it’s important that Brogad and his minions don’t get too defensive at this time. The bunker mentality, always dangerous, could be lethal right about now. Testy annoyance because of good questions from a journalist, as happened with Dionne Jackson-Miller recently, is unnecessary.

So there are very strong and powerful arguments for either locking down, by which is meant completely ‘shutting down’ almost all social and economic activity, or ‘opening up’, by which is meant encouraging carefulness and voluntary social distancing, but otherwise only restricting the aged and the especially vulnerable.

Extremes

It shouldn’t need to be said – but often those are the things that most urgently have to be – that there are extremes on either end of this spectrum that are neither desirable nor practicable. For example, even in our most extreme version of ‘shutting down’ we don’t want to be welding people into their buildings like the Chinese did for a while, and even in our most extreme version of ‘opening up’ we won’t be running an islandwide ‘hug your neighbour’ campaign. Not until this thing is over.

What there is no good argument for is the middle of the road, neither fish nor fowl, half-pregnant option. I’m going to call that the ‘pon de river, pon de bank’ option, in honour of the Elephant Man immigration debacle, where it’s evident the Government theoretically wants to get everyone to be truthful with their immigration declarations, but charges a fine of J$100 if you flout the law. Remember that? Fo’ shizzle you dizzle.

Lock down the schools. Pon de river! Open the BPOs. Pon de bank! Lock down the bars. Inna de river! Open financial institutions. Pon de bank! Lock down the churches. Pon de river! Open the post office! Pon de bank! Lock down St Catherine with a window for escape: wi tek dancing to a higher rank!!!

I’ve seen nuff dance before,

but I’ve never seen anodda dance like this.

I’ve seen nuff dance before,

but dah one yah come top de list!

Back to the serious issue. There’s a real argument that the viable window for going into an effective tight-enough lockdown has passed, and if that’s so, we need to explore other options. For an effective lockdown we would have needed to arrange food distribution through our best government agencies and logistics companies, deputise the sizeable private-security firms and some ‘community leaders’ to help with policing, and aggressively tested, tested, tested. Our local tinderbox does not permit much room for error.

Alternative

The alternative would be a version of the Swedish scenario, where they are allowing the virus to run its course without committing economic suicide. They were able to ramp up their hospital capacity and commit to voluntary social-distancing measures.

Country comparisons are notoriously difficult and it’s way too early to draw definitive results. But they have persisted along the path first touted by the British that came to be called the ‘herd immunity’ strategy. And since granny always warned that ram goat must know the size of his behind before swallowing a pear seed, it may be that the lockdown pear seed is just too much.

We know our social realities. If we determine that the window for an effective lockdown has closed, we need to explore the alternative. Sadly, there is no doubt that according to that way of proceeding more bodies pile up more quickly.

However, it’s worth remembering that, at best, the ‘flatten the curve’ strategy we’re employing only buys us time. Perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘only’ because time is so important. But ultimately, the virus is going to make its way around the town and into every nook and cranny and granny. That’s the difficult truth.

Had we been out of the blocks really early, screening and quarantining soon after the viral bat-soup was enjoyed in Wuhan, then we might have had some level of control. Right now, perhaps that particular window is long closed, and the words ‘community spread’ are on everyone’s lips because the virus is on many of those lips, too.

Very many Jamaicans don’t have enough savings to feed themselves or their families beyond a week or two (maybe a day or two). And many live a sort of hunter-gatherer existence, where steady storage and refrigeration of foodstuff is a somewhat distant dream. They therefore emerge to forage for themselves each day. The technical term for it is ‘informal hustling’.

How can you look at someone like that and tell them to shelter in place and practise social distancing for a month or two? “Dat nah goh happen! Dat will neva happen! Yuh will neva live fi see dat happen!”

That’s even before getting to the living arrangements and conditions of so many of our countrymen. Social distancing is an exotic upper middle- class concept entirely foreign to the original ‘yard’ reality of multiple people to a room, and multiple families to a house, and multiple houses to a yard. Social distancing? “Dat nah goh happen!”

We need to have this debate urgently. The half-pregnant pon de river, pon de bank thing going on will end up being the worst of both worlds. Government must choose a path and stick to it and stop trying to be all things to all men.

- Daniel Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com