Letter of the Day | Striking that balance between lives and livelihoods

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Where the Jamaican people’s experience is teaching them something different from the official line, all the attempts to ‘persuade’ by way of police or marshals or penalties will fail. Both experience and failure are happening right now

The throngs of buyers and sellers, mostly without masks, in the Coronation and other big town country markets on a Saturday and other days, or on Kingston’s commercial streets or Montego Bay’s, are the regular experience. Let the health authorities tell us how many infections and deaths are the outcome in those areas. I am eager to hear. If many, then why yet no limits imposed there, the way it was done with the business processing place in St Catherine, a localised clampdown? If very few negative cases or none, then point made.

And not only that – the policy conclusion must be drawn, so that official credibility be no further undermined. The core of that policy has been laid out by Dr Alfred Dawes in his to-date three articles, the ones I’ve seen in The Gleaner anyway. It is to attend to the number not of infections, but of necessary hospitalisations and of deaths. Counting these latter two signals where to draw a halt, when to impose the needed confinement – which can be quite limited (as in the case below) – of a community or institution or tourist admission.

Dawes ( Gleaner, November 29, 2020) cites the telling case of the Golden Age Home – 65 residents contracted COVID-19 with between 15 and 20 expected to die (given resident ages and co-morbidities) but in fact, only one died from the deadly virus. Generating panic and, based on the possible consequences of asymptomatic infections, therefore tightening restrictions not just narrowly – as was, in fact, correctly done – but very broadly, is not the route to take. Dawes’ middle-of-the-road path is the narrow restriction.

DIFFERENT SITUATION

Yes, we had spikes from Emancipendence and the September parliamentary election. The current situation is different, though. Why it is so, I don’t yet know. Our ‘authorities’ must help with that analysis. We may be using masks more but, judging from Coronation Market, I would say not by much. Or are our climate and race behind the difference? Or are mutations of the virus occurring? Or has some ‘herd’ immunity developed? Does any of us know? Who is the Solomon? Today’s situation may be quite different, though, from the situation three or four months ago.

What we do know – and should learn from – are the experiences of Taiwan and New Zealand (in a slightly larger population, one-tenth of our deaths). We also, above all, know OUR experience (if we will only hear), that is what OUR people are factually telling us. This we would be foolish to be deaf to, in not just in words, but in deeds, “striking a balance between lives and livelihoods” of, most of all, the weakest, poorest and the especially vulnerable of OUR OWN people.

HORACE LEVY