We have to be ready to live with the Coronavirus

Thanks to the pandemic, unemployment rate has shot up, earnings reports are dreadful, whole sectors—air travel, hospitality—are being wiped out. Millions of Indians have already lost their jobs. Countless small businesses have closed—many for good.

It is a catastrophe. But you know all that.

What’s needed now? A certain shift in stance and attitude that allows a broader appreciation of our predicament.

Our economy is experiencing a great contraction – it is becoming smaller, more airless. As a nation we have rightly focused on the illness that caused all this.

But the economic contraction will have repercussions as destructive as the virus itself. People are suffering because of lost jobs, lost income and a feeling of no opportunity, no hope. We can’t grapple only with the illness; we have to grapple with the devastation also. The bias now should be towards re-opening - doing everything we can to allow the economy to become itself again, to the degree that’s possible.

We need to escape from the false dichotomy which insists that the only way to improve public health is by shutting down the economy and the only way to improve the economy is by sacrificing public health.

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Vaccines are hard enough to develop in normal circumstances. After decades of trying, we still don’t have vaccines against HIV. The fastest vaccine ever developed for a viral infection is the Ebola vaccine, which took five years. And yet many commentators talk about developing a vaccine within 12 to 18 months, as if it were a piece of cake.

The starting point for a more realistic strategy is the realization that not everyone is equally susceptible. There is considerable evidence that younger people largely avoid the worst health outcomes. That is not to say that younger people are not vulnerable. Still, the much lower incidence of death among younger people warrants a reconsideration of our one-size-fits-all approach to stay-at-home policies, especially outside the hard-hit regions such as Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad.

To start, we need to work as quickly as possible to reopen schools. Children have a low risk of falling seriously ill due to Covid-19, and the majority can and should return to school at the earliest. Switzerland, for example, is planning to reopen schools from tomorrow, based on research showing that school closures were among the least effective measures at reducing European Covid-19 cases.

Children who live with the elderly or other at-risk individuals should continue to stay at home. Schools should immediately begin to develop virtual lesson plans for those who must remain at home. Similarly, we should reopen workplaces to healthy, non-elderly individuals who don’t live with vulnerable people.

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Private sector has a big role to play in the recovery process of the economy. We must unleash the creativity and innovation of private enterprise. Not only doctors and scientists, business has a big role to play in getting us out of this crisis. We have a potentially vibrant private sector. There’s an immense amount of energy and ingenuity and fresh thinking there.

We have to cooperate by doing the things that contain the illness so that businesses can stay open and functioning. A mask isn’t a sign of submission as some idiots claim. It’s a sign of respect, responsibility and economic encouragement.

It isn’t safety or business. It is safety right now which allows business.

Every Indian can contribute by observing the protocols we now know by heart—washing hands, maintaining social distance, wearing masks, using hand sanitizer. If we do everything we can to make people safe, we’ll be doing everything to get business going.

But most of all, we have to completely change our mind-set. Instead of thinking up creative ways to force people to stay at home, we should think hard every day about how to bring more people back to work.

Reopening the economy is not merely about livelihoods, but also about lives. We must return to life.

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Thanks for reading. All views are personal.

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