Advertisement
Coronavirus pandemic
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Swee Kheng Khor
Swee Kheng Khor

Opinion | Until there’s a Covid-19 vaccine, here are three ways governments can make decisions to restart their countries

  • We all want to restart our economies and societies as safely and quickly as possible while we wait for a coronavirus vaccine, but how?
  • Governments can have predictable time schedules for decisions, use predictable decision criteria, and gradually reopen by sectors not geographies

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
A health worker collects a nasal swab sample from a man to test for the coronavirus in Paris, as France cautiously eases its two-month lockdown. Photo: AP
Swee Kheng Khor
Everyone wants to know when Covid-19 will “end”. The short answer is when we find a vaccine and administer it to 80-95 per cent of the world’s population, which will be mid-2021 at the earliest.

Twelve months is a long time to be making crucial Covid-19 decisions in a volatile and unpredictable environment. Lockdowns have generally worked, but they are blunt instruments and cannot last till mid-2021.

We all want to restart our economies and societies as safely, quickly and widely as possible. How should governments decide how, how much, how fast and which sectors to restart?

Soldiers patrol next to a locked down part of Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Photo: AP
Soldiers patrol next to a locked down part of Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Photo: AP

I offer three suggestions. If implemented together, we can create a steady state of predictable decision-making until we deliver a vaccine to all 7.7 billion human beings.

The first suggestion is to be more predictable in the time schedule of decisions. Right now, the general trend is to make reactive decisions to lift lockdowns or restart economies based on ad hoc events, whenever economic or political pressures become overwhelming, or when epidemiological indicators show the smallest sign of recovery.

Advertisement