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Inside Out & Outside In
OpinionComment
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

With economic catastrophe looming, we can’t wait until everyone is vaccinated to get back to business as usual

  • The pandemic’s savage economic impact is, at present, being mitigated by widespread support packages, but such massive spending cannot go on much longer
  • Instead of each country working for itself, leaders should agree on global protocols so we can save jobs and resume work amid the pandemic

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A man eats his dinner in an alleyway as another checks his phone in a residential doorway in Hong Kong on January 4. Hong Kong’s jobless rate hit a 16-year high in the final quarter of 2020. Photo: AFP
David Dodwell

As more jobs are lost worldwide, and increasing thousands of normally seaworthy companies teeter on the brink of insolvency, the gruesome reach of the world’s worst pandemic crisis in a century is becoming clear.

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It is not just a matter of the almost 100 million Covid-19 cases worldwide, and more than 2 million deaths. Nor is it a matter, as the International Labour Organization measures, of the equivalent of almost 350 million jobs lost worldwide in the third-quarter of 2020 alone (based on the number of hours of work lost). Nor is it a matter of the trillions of dollars being spent to provide economic life-support – though all three have us wringing our hands.

No: worst of all is the growing realisation that this plague and its economic impact will still be gripping us well into 2022. No wonder the International Air Travel Association (IATA) warned in May that the world’s aviation industry is unlikely to see recovery until 2024.

Until recently, there was rising hope that the arrival of vaccines would bring light to the end of an already long tunnel. Getting trusted vaccines ready for market has indeed been a great achievement, but optimism over their potential as a “silver bullet” has been tempered by the awesome challenges of vaccine production, the unseemly political squabbles over safe distribution, and the logistical task of getting doses into people’s arms.
Most now believe a significant proportion of the world’s population will still be waiting for vaccines at the end of this year, and that most countries’ strategies to return to business as usual will only work when all have been inoculated.

05:09

What there is to know about the Covid-19 vaccines roll out in Hong Kong

What there is to know about the Covid-19 vaccines roll out in Hong Kong

This is where I part company with the strategies of most governments, which I believe are profoundly wrong-headed. And this includes the Hong Kong government. The awkward reality is that we don’t have the luxury of waiting until vaccines have done their work, and the world has been immunised.

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