Clearly initial estimates weren’t quite so right and the lockdown, on the global scale, will need to be far longer than just two weeks. Although there is some light at the end of the tunnel. According to some experts, mostly American, there is a slight chance that after peaking over yet two more weeks the coronavirus might begin to die down a little bit. But all that, so far, is conjecture. It will only be known whether or not to let the guard down once we are at that point, roughly a fortnight from now, when a few are expecting some better times. For now, everybody must prepare for things to get worse before anything even begins to get better.
There are two big problems with this. One, what to do about the economy? Pumping some money into financial markets and keeping the real economy alive with different doses of stimulus was a good one-off idea, but it can’t be done again and again. With production and therefore earning slowing if not stopping, where will the money come from to actually finance a prolonged lockdown? Surely a complete shutdown cannot possibly be observed, anywhere in the world, beyond the very short term. That is because it is abundantly clear that the crisis is going to last beyond a couple of weeks. And more than a small manner of economic activity will have to be resumed.
And two, there are always going to be social implications of lockdowns without end. Nobody needs to be reminded that Pakistan is a country with a very large population, and a big bulk of it lives in small, crowded homes. While it is surely important to keep people protected as much as possible, other social issues also need to be kept in mind. But allowing people some relief from the quarantine, especially so some of them can help get the economy going again, is not without the most serious implications. Not even the first signs of the coronavirus subsiding have begun to appear. This is, therefore, going to be a much longer fight than first anticipated. All focus must now be on making sure that the people who do venture out do so in the most sanitised environment. If the economy stops, so will everybody’s lives. The best hope, then, is to resume minimum functioning of the economy till some smart corner of the world comes up with a vaccine for this deadly virus. *