Should country governments continue to rely on lockdowns ”to live and let live” in a world where the COVID-19 virus strain or coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its variants have yet to become like the common influenza and cold viruses?
The rhetoric behind lockdowns is to save lives by reducing the speed of virus transmissions and ease the pressure on public and private health systems coming from intensive treatments that many COVID-19 patients require. For almost two years now, a number of country governments have been imposing all sorts of lockdowns and restrictions to mobility. International travel for the public was also put much on hold, especially under the height of the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 to March 2021.
The availability of authorized COVID-19 vaccines beginning with Johnson & Johnson´s vaccine in February 2021, followed by Pfizer/BioNTech and other vaccines, brought in hope the pandemic might soon be over. That hope was crushed in November 2021 by the rise and spread of a new variant of the COVID-19 virus, the B.1.1.529, named Omicron. By mid-December 2021, Norway and many European countries reimposed lockdowns and other measures restricting economic activities and people´s mobility to prevent the spread of the newer variant Omicron that was allegedly easier to transmit, but had yet to be fully understood by the medical community.
Many people accepted lockdowns without much fuss in 2020. But the economic meltdown brought about by closing down common economic activities and even country boundaries for an extended period of time as a public health measure to prevent transmission and ”save lives” is becoming a ”tired cliche,” especially for those who have lost much money or have no longer money to spare.
It is now 2022, but many countries around the world have yet to find a way to live alongside the coronavirus 2 and its newer variants without the use of lockdowns.
Lockdowns so far has been the most common measure country governments have resorted to in the past two years to reduce the pressure on the available hospital and other health facilities imposed by the usually more intensive treatments that COVID-19 patients require. Country residents have embraced it in the first year of the pandemic, from March 2020 to March 2021, without much fuss. Accepting lockdowns then meant choosing ”life first” before anything else.
But lockdowns restrict economic activities and movement, and many people who have been used to depending on monthly income streams from their work activities would have used up much of their savings in a year´s time, if businesses could not open up and people could not move around like before.
Thus, it was not unexpected that continued lockdowns from March 2021 until today have not gotten so much public support as the case was in the first year of the pandemic. Many of those who have become skeptical to lockdowns are after all those who have gotten at least two vaccine shots with half-closed eyes. They took the vaccine shots in the belief this could help their countries solve the pandemic by building herd immunity – the situation when enough number of people would have acquired resistance to the virus – although they were not so sure how this new vaccine would affect their own health in the end.
The problem is, country governments have been sidetracked with the short-term need to care for those who got very sick and who needed hospital help to survive the virus, that they have not had the time and resources to work overtime on studying how herd immunity is progressing. Country virology centers or more coordinated efforts to study how various groups of the population have reacted to the virus have yet to be put up to date. Studies of how people who have survived the COVID-19 virus, with or without after taking a minimum of two vaccine shots, have yet to be done on the needed massive scale. And then, let us remember that a study of the unvaccinated and how they are reacting to the COVID-19 virus must also be done, alongside the study of the vaccinated groups.
Country governments at this point in time, 17th of January 2022 have to consider that prolonged lockdowns are hurting their national economies, and more importantly the economies of private households. In countries where there are not enough social safety nets or not enough government dole-outs going to each family monthly, prolonged lockdowns would result in private bankruptcies and social disruptions, as well as unrest from groups who are not anymore able to participate anymore in economic activities like before, and have lost the ability to support themselves by being employed by someone else or by their business initiatives. It is a must that the country statistics bureaus step up efforts to measure how much of country populations have now become ”poor” or which groups have become ”poorer” because of prolonged economics lockdowns after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These new statistics could guide country governments on which economic measures are needed to help alleviate the plight of the new poor and increased number of poorer households.
Another important task each country government should look at now is how to effectively achieve herd immunity against the COVID-19 virus for its population. It is high time someone out there would find out if the COVID-19 virus and its variants have now started to become like the common influenza and cold viruses, or is that possible at all, or how long would that take to happen? Life and economic activities after the COVID-19 pandemic would not be the same again, but businesses could and should find a way to open up again, such that the average person who wants to work could work or find work. Life after all is more than just surviving.
