Road accidents are likely to kill more people than coronavirus. The world needs to keep perspective

Rich communities can fund collapsing businesses for a while. But can the developing world really enforce coronavirus lockdowns?
A balance should be struck between the threat of one disease and the social cost of measures against it

Philip Bowring

Published: 8:30am, 29 Mar 2020

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“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Less than 50 years after poet John Donne wrote those words, in 1665 London was struck by the plague. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe vividly described the cries of the starving, unemployed due to the closure of businesses, and the flight to the countryside of those who could.

Today we find countries around the world closing their borders to each other – though all have the virus. What makes sense for one country breeds catastrophe when most do it. Let us not fool ourselves into believing either that closures and lockdowns are sustainable, or that they work other than in the very short term.

Can we in Hong Kong believe that two weeks of border closure can solve the problem when two things are already obvious from the limited data available?

Firstly, we still have little idea of how widespread the virus is. Even countries like South Korea, Germany and Australia, with high numbers of tests per million, have tested only a small proportion. Korea, for example, has tested 348,000 people, or 6,800 per million; Hong Kong and Japan have tested a fraction of that; Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia, almost none. China does not release such figures, nor Singapore, Egypt and so on.

The rate of positives varies widely and it is difficult to draw conclusions from data which ranges from around 1 per cent in Australia to nearly 20 per cent in Italy. Death rates also range from around 1.5 per cent in Korea to nearly 10 per cent in Italy. There are many unknowns, including test quality.

China has largely claimed victory and declared a gradual return to normal, even in Wuhan. But as the Post reported, a study there suggests that there were a huge number of asymptomatic cases which were not reported to the authorities.

China is winning the Covid-19 fight but losing the economic war

Then there is the even bigger issue of populous developing countries (the majority in the world) having neither the administrative, financial, technical nor human resources to track, trace and treat coronavirus effectively. Some have simply been in denial.

Others have belatedly woken up and are identifying growing numbers of cases but they lack the capacity for anything beyond urging social distancing and issuing unenforceable decrees. Can Ethiopia close its 5,000km borders? Will 1.3 billion Indians stay home for weeks rather than earn a living? How many resources will be taken away from combating endemic bigger killers?

Salaried bureaucrats and salaried experts can demand economic sacrifice. The media can cry that one cannot put a price on life. But that is simply not the case. Governments, even individuals, have to do so. Should they fund costly treatments which help only a few, mainly the old? Should you pay a huge sum for the latest treatment to prolong for a few months the life of an 80-year-old relative?

Rich communities can fund collapsing businesses and unemployed workers for a while. But even just a few weeks of trade shutdown adds tens of billions to government debt, already very high in many countries, especially those hurt by the 2008 financial crisis.

More debt now means fewer hospitals, nurses, unemployment relief, roads, schools, pensions in future. Is anyone even discussing trade-offs, the balance between the health threat of one disease and the social cost of extreme measures against it?

Nationalist, beggar-thy-neighbour policies are disrupting international relations, as witness further US-China friction. The global shutdown scenario is even more dangerous for developing countries with fewer financial and administrative resources and high numbers of self-employed workers in marginal jobs.

For how long before an eruption of the social and political turmoil which resulted from the Asian financial crisis?

For how long before an eruption of the social and political turmoil which resulted from the Asian financial crisis? Youth and hot humid climates are more likely mitigators of the coronavirus risk.

I suspect that countries which can control the flow of data and news will prefer to get people back to work rather than pursue intensive testing. Could one blame them? Let us keep perspective. So far 23,000 people worldwide have died. Even at 10 times that number it would still be a fraction of annual deaths from tuberculosis and road accidents – each well over a million.

At age 77, statistically I have about a 4 per cent chance of dying within a year. The virus increases that marginally. How many younger lives will be lost, families made destitute by unemployment and hence victims of the economic devastation caused by exaggerating this threat because it is new? Caution can slow its spread but it is a dangerous illusion to think we can make islands for ourselves.

Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator

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