Herd immunity and lockdown

Thursday 15th October, 2020

It looks as if the world had been left with no alternative but to learn to live with coronavirus, which shows no signs of going away anytime soon, until a vaccine is found. The task of producing a vaccine is likely to take longer than expected.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned against pursuing herd immunity, which is said to come about when a pandemic is allowed to spread freely until everyone is infected. The proponents of this controversial approach are some western nations which did not care to take any precautions at the early stages of the pandemic, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. The WHO says this approach is ‘unethical’, and herd immunity is something to be achieved not by exposing people to the disease but by protecting them against it. The way some countries have sought to gain herd immunity is not only unethical but also criminal, one may say, given the sheer number of lives lost due to their failed experiment. Those who pursued herd immunity, the wrong way, have wised up, at last.

The WHO has also highlighted the ill-effects of lockdowns, which many countries hastened to impose at the early stages of the pandemic. It has said, “Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle; and that is making the poor people an awful lot poorer.” The poor were the worst hit during lockdowns, as we saw a few moons ago, here, but lockdowns also reduced many middle-income earners to penury. These are the socio-economic costs of lockdowns, and they have made governments fight shy of re-imposing them or resort to them selectively as a pis aller, the way Sri Lanka has done in dealing with the latest wave of infections.

The WHO says it does not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of controlling COVID-19. Dr. David Nabarro, WHO Special Envoy for COVID-19, has gone on record as saying, “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.” What the WHO has left unsaid is that we have to employ other methods such as quarantine and physical distancing to combat the virus if we are to prevail.

Sri Lanka apparently got its act together, during protracted lockdowns and quarantine curfews, thanks to the health workers, the military, the police, and the political leadership. It succeeded in preventing the healthcare system being overwhelmed and reduced infections to a bare minimum. That was no mean achievement for a developing country. But those gains were lost a couple of months later due to complacency, and now the country is reeling from a resurgence of infections. Desperate attempts are being made again to contain the virus with lockdowns and curfews in areas with surging case loads. The garment factory cluster of infections has been blamed on a group of workers brought here from India. It is also believed that infections had been spreading, for about two months before being detected thanks to a recent random PCR test on a garment worker at a government hospital.

Besides the threat of a tidal wave of COVID-19 ripping through the country, lockdowns and curfews in some parts of the Western Province have caused a huge loss to the economy now in tatters. It must, therefore, be found out whether there is any truth in the claim that the aforesaid workers were not properly quarantined upon their arrival here. If it can be proved that they triggered the present wave of infections, those responsible for bringing them here must be made to bear the cost of the ongoing operations to contain the disease.

Punishing those who endanger the lives of the public and cause losses to the country will make others act responsibly while the country is struggling to deal with an increasing case load. After all, the government has introduced laws to fine and even imprison those who violate the anti-COVID-19 health regulations.