Saturday Dec 28, 2024
Saturday Dec 28, 2024
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According to Sri Lanka’s official labour force statistics, nearly 161,000 jobs were lost in the first quarter of 2020 with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country. With the easing of the lockdowns, some of these jobs were restored but the employment level is still grossly under the full potential – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara
We were recently treated to an Expert paper arguing our economic plight from pointless, recurring lockdowns would not be as bad as we thought. And superstitiously, it insisted, each week “shut” of “life foregone” would save lives.
Economic impact of a hard islandwide lockdown
According to Sri Lanka’s official labour force statistics, nearly 161,000 jobs were lost in the first quarter of 2020 with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country. With the easing of the lockdowns, some of these jobs were restored but the employment level is still grossly under the full potential. No tap dancing will make it otherwise.
Impact on those who were employed in the services sector, especially in the leisure and tourism sectors, wreaked havoc. Individuals employed in the informal economy which often operates without any employment contracts saw their jobs getting scrapped by employers struggling to stay afloat.
Formal sector employers also had to restrain operational costs by introducing voluntary resignation schemes and early retirement schemes and freezing ongoing recruitments. Therefore, each week of lockdown will only prolong any recovery of the job market.
During the last 30 years Sri Lanka has been able to witness a remarkable reduction in poverty. The poverty headcount index has been continuously falling since 1995 and by 2016 it stood at 4.1. This figure is well below the global and regional averages. A simulation done by the World Bank suggests that the USD poverty rate increased from 9.2% in 2019 to 11.7% in 2020 as a result of the crisis.
The COVID-19 crisis has had a devastating blow to the livelihoods of the poor. Savings level among the poor is understandably weak making their ability to withstand negative shocks to their income almost impossible. Thus, it is hard to quantify the lockdown impact, further deteriorating poverty indicators reflecting precipitous additional, already unmanageable declines in quality of life for the poor.
In addition, indebtedness is generally very high among the rural population (61% indebted level in 2016). Loss of income for a sustained period of time has serious economic and social implications for the poor, already highly indebted. In times of distress, they turn to informal sector lenders who charge a hefty premium over the going market rates which aggravates indebtedness further.
In 2020, Sri Lanka suffered the worst recession on record. In the first half, where the lockdown was mostly in force, the economy contracted by 1.3% and 15.3% in respective quarters. With the current spike in Delta-variant infection rates, a debate has emerged whether imposing a hard lockdown is the right course of action to get the situation under control.
We need careful distancing and early treatment and astute public health for sure. “Lockdown per se” though would shave off about $ 1.67 b from the economy per month very conservatively.
Average household debt per indebted household to banks, finance and leasing companies are Rs. 337,855 and Rs. 428,139 respectively. Harsh shutdown means the incomes of households will painfully impact their ability to service their debt. Therefore, overall credit growth and the credit quality will suffer too.
Sri Lanka’s finance and leasing companies cater to the most vulnerable sectors of the economy while banks are likely to have a relatively sophisticated clientele. Impact on the incomes of poor households is likely to be much more severe leading to marked decline in debt recoveries among finance and leading companies. As a result, leasing and finance companies will experience acute deterioration in their balance sheets.
Stocks plummeted by 17% in March 2020 triggering authorities to shut down the Colombo Stock Exchange for over a month to prevent further collapse of the market. But in the third quarter, as economy bounced back, market saw record performance, whether based on exuberance or assessment. The stock market indices would take a hit causing investors to lose money and adding to the volatility narrative. In such a circumstance, attracting much needed foreign investment to the equity market may be more than challenging.
Biggest impact to the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) come from loss of revenues from a lockdown. During such a period, smaller businesses may struggle to find working capital to finance their fixed costs. Micro sector which often has stressed balance sheets will find it desperately difficult to access formal financial markets.
During 2020, the revenue side of the Government plummeted by 28%. The main reason for the weaker state revenue is lockdown measures adopted by the Government. The current structure of State expenditure makes it impossible for the Government to reduce expenditure to match the shortfall in revenue. Hence, if recurring lockdowns keep being imposed, the Government must somehow scamper to adapt to the painfully lower level of revenue leading to a deterioration in fiscal balance.
The “medical” lockdown fiasco
Mass lockdowns, advised against by every public health nostrum in the world until February 2020, going all the way back to the Middle Ages, were “ordered” into respectability by Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Western enablers, outrageously promulgated these on the basis of no evidence (then or now, as waves of recurring shutdowns only prove the pathetic failure of this complete absence of logic).
So, we have a virus from China, with a panic-stricken public health policy from China, that via draconian Government intrusion into civil liberties, converts the world into China. Well done! And this for a pathogen which for those below 70 and without chronic contributing illnesses, has a recovery rate above 99%!
The clearly contrived videos of people “falling dead” in Wuhan, a parody of anything we’ve seen since, have been forgotten. Care homes in Lombardy, where the ill, mass infected the most vulnerable added to the distortion, only to later conclude as per the Italian head of Public Health, “only 12% actually died due to COVID”. By then the damage was done.
Over a year later, with a failed “zero COVID” bid as medically blinkered as it gets, New Zealand still has deleted their COVID-19 ‘Elimination Strategy document’ (physical distancing, widespread testing, surveillance) indicating straight lifts from the clearly contrived Wuhan tale that had been spun.
One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch Government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit.
The Government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed. The Dutch Government knowingly took a course of action that would cause health damage—let alone economic damage—six times worse for the Dutch people, out of a concern for optics.
Based on WHO guidance (based on a complete misunderstanding of the situation), citing Chinese journal articles, doctors around the world began putting patients on ventilators en masse, killing literally thousands before a grassroots campaign of medical sanity stopped the practice.
Based on WHO’s initial guidance (now contradicted) on COVID-19 testing, again citing Chinese journal articles, labs used, and some continue to use, PCR cycle thresholds from 37 to 40, and sometimes as high as 45. At these cycle threshold levels, approximately 85% to 90% of cases are false positives, as even confirmed by The New York Times.
The WHO’s PCR guidance was paired with new international ICD-10 codes for COVID deaths to make COVID-19 quite possibly the deadliest accounting fraud of all time. According to this, if a decedent had either tested positive or been in contact with anyone who had, within several weeks prior to their death, or been tested positive at the time of death, then the death should be classified as a COVID-19 death.
The result was a terrifying number of supposed “COVID-19 deaths” that were disconnected to the number of “excess deaths” in a given year in a location, irrespective of how many or how few lockdown measures were utilised. This absurd number of “COVID-19 deaths” has been used to rationalise any manner of devastation caused by governments’ response to COVID-19—from bankruptcies and mental health crises to escalating deaths (many times those “ascribed” to the pathogen) from lockdowns, delayed or deferred health care, or vaccinations for diseases we were actually successfully routing until then.
The snowball effect of the little white lie, that China had controlled the virus, was soon apparent in journalists’ own writing. One after another, they fell victim to their own collective propaganda. Global media outlets legitimised a ludicrous narrative in which the CCP’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated domestic cases from all of China, but not before the virus had spread everywhere outside China “somehow”, where governments now had no choice but to adopt the CCP’s lockdown policies.
Why? The death tallies in Asia and Africa were so “unpandemic” as to be laughable. But no, the “elites” in Europe and the US were perturbed and we were all too silly to go with the obvious: focused protection of the vulnerable for a clearly age-stratified virus and investigating all possible treatments.
Within months, the glitterati begun to sound like foaming-at-the-mouth fascists, their every word dripping with illiberalism as they implored the world to emulate a non-sustainable playbook of economic and social suicide as a medical strategy. And for the first time in medical history, we decided “not” to treat the disease though we now know there are a plethora of efficacious, cost-effective early treatments, that where applied, have eliminated virtually the mortality risk of the vulnerable as well! We ordered non-treatment, until people were critically ill!
It’s hard to think of many things worse than marching the world toward totalitarianism out of embarrassment. But sadly, embarrassment and denial appear to be the primary motivations of world leaders today.
From the courts to the media and politicians, it all amounts to a collective shirking of responsibility for determining whether lockdown policies have been implemented on fraudulent pretences, and whether those policies actually work (over 45 solid data-based research papers show they don’t, and I have cited them in numerous articles), whether this truly was a “novel” coronavirus, whether early treatments are being smothered and smeared by pharmaceutical interests. It seems we began to enjoy the stench!
The cover up
Everything since “15 days to slow the spread”—from the fear propaganda to the masks to the school closures and vaccine passes—has been a cover-up of the catastrophe that was the original lockdowns and the insanity of trusting untested misinformation as heady wisdom. Millions surely suspect the lockdown fraud but feel some subtle aversion to saying so. They don’t want to seem radical or “conspiratorial” or they think it’s someone else’s job.
Clownishly, people were intimidated by having “the science” flaunted. But they forgot that neither lockdowns, nor masking, not extreme distancing, nor trying to bolt the barn door after the airborne virus has obviously wafted out, were on any public health guidance before 2019, and made no more sense a year later when they were “inflicted”, never tested or compared with what was truly established practice globally.
But among those who really do believe China’s COVID-19 narrative, or merely pretend to, all the authoritarian methods that supposedly contributed to China’s “success”—including censoring, cancelling, and firing those who disagree—are on the table. The vast majority of professionals simply now lack the courage to speak up publicly against a fanatical power bloc armed, at least for now, with these illiberal powers in their crusade for “Zero COVID”.
Incongruence
The truth is that even as scientists and politicians support lockdown mandates, few really believe in them. This can be said with certainty based on their own actions. It’s hard to find scientists and politicians who haven’t been caught breaking their own COVID rules. But none of them, even heads of state, feel they have the power to speak up against lockdown measures without inconveniencing their careers. And anyway, these policymakers seem to think, these rules must not be a very big deal, given how easily they personally can break them.
The public was led to believe that lockdowns were grounded in rigorous “science,” and that by following them, they were “following science.” The metrics preferred by media outlets have shifted constantly—from mortality to hospitalisations to “cases” (which once meant “symptoms”) to sheer PCR tarted up “positive tests” —to rationalise public anxiety. With few exceptions, this failure to “crush” the virus has been attributed absurdly, to lockdown leniency, rather than to their evidently fraudulent scientific origins.
At the heart of the lockdown madness was the collective fantasy of controlling a common respiratory pathogen—a feat the epidemiology profession had agreed was impossible and self-destructive over history and was the scientific consensus just months prior. Instead, the virus appears to be resurgent in “waves” despite the use of these socially and economically suicidal measures. Our vaccines ride to the rescue, just in time to stoke variants. We are Dr. Frankenstein.
Unfortunately, for the millions of workers and small business owners whose life’s work has been destroyed; the millions of children who have been robbed of years of education and terrorised into believing they’re vectors for disease; the hundreds of millions in the developing world whose governments can’t feed them with debt; and the parents who don’t want to raise their children in a world where long-cherished rights can be indefinitely tossed aside, none of the fairy tales of the super virus so potent only totalitarianism can possibly stop it, fly.
You may recall Iceland had “conquered” COVID via masking, as had Vietnam through contact tracing and intense restrictions. Yet today, see the runaway levels of “cases” there and in the latter even “deaths” (in percentage terms, approaching the US per million). No masks in most of Florida, rather ill-disciplined on that front in India, and both are far more open and in positive metrics, outperforming Israel or the Seychelles or Peru (models of masking and vaccination exemplars and also of recurrent waves).
The flip side of the phony lockdown and masking “success” narratives is a widespread government and media-inspired terror of the virus that is wildly out of proportion to the relatively moderate health risks it poses. According to the most widely cited study on COVID-19’s IFR (infection fatality rate) by age, the average IFR for those under 40 years old is around 0.01%. But in surveys conducted regularly by the University of Southern California, on average, Americans under 40 have consistently estimated their chance of dying if they contract the virus to be around 10%, a 1,000-fold overestimation.
Likewise, in October 2020, the WHO’s peer-reviewed bulletin showed COVID-19’s overall IFR across all age groups to be about 0.23%. John Ioannidis, the world’s most-cited physician, believes the IFR to be lower and published his own peer-reviewed study showing the overall IFR to be about 0.15%. But in a poll conducted by the Menzies Research Centre, by June 2021 Australians on average estimated their chance of dying if they contracted the virus to be 38%, an overestimation of more than 160-fold.
For the public to be so egregiously misinformed about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible. Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own Government’s decision to employ drastic lockdown measures.
“We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the Government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if Government’s taking such drastic measures’. We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.”
The policies thus create a feedback loop in which the measures themselves sow the fear that makes citizens believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 is hundreds of times greater than it really is, which in turn causes them to support the frenzied destruction of their own societies. Even vaccines won’t pacify us, nor treatments we oddly, refuse to learn about and apply!
Not that journalists and scientists are alone in this regard. Far from it. Every step of the way, the international synchronisation of lockdown mandates has given a cosmopolitan veneer to policies that are inherently unscientific, unprecedented, ineffective, totalitarian, brutal, and dumb. The components of the lockdown fraud are so glaringly obvious, and its mechanics and methods so overtly Orwellian, it’s hard not to conclude that illiberalism became something of a global fad in 2020.
We scrubbed off a surface coating of humane compassion and revealed the mad mania for subjugating our fellow man, just beneath. And our leaders with no ideas or purposes to rally us with, whine and squeal their “orders”, and flex their “inner Mussolini”, gloating at the games their “power” enables.
The choice
Having absorbed disinformation into policy, the formidable machinery of Western institutions has, perversely, helped promulgate a totalitarian hygiene regime around the world, and turned against those standing up for Western values – their very citizens the politicians appear too spineless to defend.
So, countries like Sri Lanka, need to beware. When the dust settles, there will or won’t be a country, a culture, a way of life. High time that we do not go along with this travesty, and the President follows his instincts to keep his country “open” but also draw on the wonderful treatments available, which our wonderful care providers can customise for our purposes.
We can stay “open,” we can avail of early treatment, we can protect each other, and the country here can grow while others evaporate if they insist. The decision to “treat” COVID and be larger than our fears, to be passionate about keeping this country flourishing, these are choices. They determine our future.
That choice is always ours.
