- And a lockdown cannot quieten the busy streets, because sometimes the streets are an extension of the accommodation. Sometimes the place of convenience is at an inconvenient distance away from the home, and no policeman can do anything about the queue of nature’s call.
The plot thickens. There is talk of peaks, and curve flattening in the atmosphere of a pandemic gathering speed. Physical distancing seems like a dismissed fairy tale. A lockdown seems like that unachievable haven, that could just have offered some security… but the door is closed.
Nobody knows how 1000 cases crept up on us in 2 days, but they have. And there is no sign that a 1000 more will not creep up in another 2 days. There are voices shouting about different things, sometimes completely counter each other. There are some solutions for the problems we have, being rolled out in countries which have a lot of what we don’t have. But some solutions just might not belong here.
This pandemic is a reset on multiple fronts. It has brought the focus on the deprivation in Ghanaian health care and research more sharply than ever before. It has also done some other things… like suddenly forcing trotro drivers to seat passengers more comfortably. Or potentially reducing the Okada carrying capacity and ultimately the number of road traffic accident deaths per day. And when this pandemic is over, life as we know it… will be back to the good old days.
This pandemic has also exposed the gulf that development creates, between the third world, and the first world. The societies that provided for their citizens long ago have been creating ‘physical distancing’, born by a lack of the need for interdependence for the basic things. The homes are self-contained, functional palaces. The buses have seats that prioritize privacy. Social interaction has been optional, based more on wants than needs. So when it was time to lock down, the streets fell silent, but life went on. It was possible to make the motivation for physical distancing switch from want to need. They could hunker down into existences that were already self dependent, and wait for the virus to run itself down.
In our world, the status quo has been a social interdependence driven by the central lack of capacity to meet essential needs of significant swathes of community. Social interaction is required to survive. The process of nurturing political leaders is one that promises elevated status to those who win elections. A status that lifts them above the needs that social interaction is essential for. They are granted new accommodation, alternative transport, different healthcare access, a new lifestyle. And so they lose touch. And the essential services that meet community needs, deteriorate, and devalue. And so health care has deteriorated to the extent it has along with other services. And a lockdown cannot quieten the busy streets, because sometimes the streets are an extension of the accommodation. Sometimes the place of convenience is at an inconvenient distance away from the home, and no policeman can do anything about the queue of nature’s call.
The pandemic has closed the routes of escape for the elevated class. We could not lock down like we needed to. And the elevated class can go nowhere. We are realizing things about ourselves that we did not know before. We now know some of what is possible to do from home. We know what physical distancing is. We know what masking does. We know that our case numbers are going up. We also know that the lockdown did not achieve what it should have. We know the challenge that our frontline healthcare workers face. We do not have enough infrastructure to defeat an enemy as formidable as COVID19. We should limit how many get infected.
We know what we have to do. We have to mask in public, keep hand hygiene and practice physical distancing. All our ingenuity must be razor focused on doing these things. All our capacity to adapt, improvise, innovate… must be channeled into the actions that facilitate these three pillars of any strategy that intends to limit the ravages of this pandemic. We also know how to test, and to isolate. And we know how to encourage the ones who have recovered, and guide them back into life as usual. We know we should not stigmatize. Information should win, and increase, not ignorance. We don’t know when the vaccine will come.
We should do what we know!
