by Omar Khan
Sri Lanka opted to throw nuance to the wind and go for an outright 24/7 multi-month curfew. Announced with mere hours of notice, it threw everyone into desperate pandemonium. Touted originally as a “weekend curfew”, when it was extended and then briefly relaxed it had people desperate to get essentials, with open-air markets here resembling a COVID-19 petri dish.
Then, four days after it was first instituted, it went back on, and has not been fully lifted as of today, May 24th, though it has been relaxed in the last few weeks. Essentially, however, from March 20th the entire economic engine came to a screeching halt, imposing grotesque suffering on the daily wage-earners (roughly 40% of the economy) and the SMEs, except for those who were able to get into the business of delivering essentials, which later came to include Big Macs from McDonalds and birthday cakes, lest the elite be too troubled by any of this.
At the time of the curfew, Lanka had 66 cases of Covid-19, with seven fatalities. One month on, post curfew, there have been 271 cases and… wait for it… seven fatalities! But rather than throwing a success party, the authorities decided to double down, even though it was now clear that the healthcare system wasn’t being overwhelmed and that the fatality needle hadn’t budged. No one is quite sure why the most draconian option was chosen and then manically sustained, except that we all mistakenly thought that this was an “equal opportunity” virus, and it’s not. The fatality numbers testify to that, and some regions are relatively far less scathed than others, which clearly hasn’t always been down to the brilliance of their response. But as per all the model-spinners and prognosticators, it was only a matter of time before things exploded here. As of today, the fatalities are up to nine, and we have been curfewed longer than Wuhan was economically shut down.
A Rough Build-Up
After a 30+ year civil war, which conscripted Buddhism and Hinduism – despite these usually being more pacific faiths, as practised – Sri Lanka had blossomed on the tourism front in particular, being crowned by Lonely Planet as “The World’s Favorite Destination” for 2019. Then came the Easter bombing, from a splinter Muslim group, which tragically hit churches and hotels, killing locals and travellers alike.
Though this decimated the tourism industry for many months, by November/December 2019 and with a great deal of pluck, fortitude, commitment and imagination, the tourist numbers and profits were climbing up once again.
And then came COVID-19.
The Global Contagion of Panic Applied Locally
Despite very modest cases here, nevertheless China’s disastrous surge, the exploding numbers in Italy and Spain, the gathering storm-clouds over the US and UK, various Drs. WHO intoning in sepulchral tones the case for impending cataclysm and the hysterical Imperial College model exploding onto the scene – all helped ignite panic.
While most countries saw a spike in cases and went for “flattening the curve”, paradoxically Lanka had no real curve to flatten and thus was unable to consult any evidence to indicate they could “relax the brakes”. They too, like much of the world, segued to “eradication”, which is implausible if not impossible, particularly as you only have to open your borders to be at least vulnerable to fresh infections.
This misplaced and unfortunate global segue – never debated, never justified – has prolonged the suspension of life as we know it, with catastrophically mounting economic costs, particularly here for a developing economy with high debt even prior to COVID-19.
To get a sense of the Lanka response, keep in mind that the ability to go and buy food, medicine and take brief walks (even if accompanied by the odd drone) were considered around the world as the very minimal liberties that even under a penal concept like lockdown could be considered “unalienable”.
Here in Lanka, despite such tame statistics, you couldn’t do any of the above. Even those who could afford it were largely at the mercy of food delivery (including from fast-food restaurants) and pharmacy deliveries. Others foraged and scavenged and hoped somehow that essentials might reach them. For those millions not equipped to be able to order online or with instruments for payment other than cash, this was a greater terror than the virus.
Even liquor stores were closed and couldn’t deliver, so a robust “home brew” market and a black market for imported booze flourished, further impoverishing an already besieged exchequer.
The monthly revenue from liquor sales in Sri Lanka is roughly USD $8 million. Now, unfortunately, locking people indoors and asking them to drink their despair away may have other health consequences, but perhaps that should argue against curfew not alcohol.
At any rate, it was medical vainglory from a politically-motivated medical trade union put in charge of the medical response (not a virologist or epidemiologist in sight) which tut-tutted the government out of these desperately-needed excise earnings at the very time that at least a $1 billion a week was being lost from a national shutdown.
The extremely well-connected were eventually able to wangle “curfew passes” and then began leading an alternative lifestyle, pontificating about public health during weekends on family estates in the hills, while everyday citizens and workers sweltered in small apartments – if not outright tenements – unable to find food, and going broke.
Nostradamus or Science?
Around the world the infection rates and fatality rates simply don’t merit the mania. However, the mania proliferates faster than the virus, and feeds on itself.
Lanka, I fear, fell afoul of the “sunk costs fallacy”. The thinking is: “We blew up our economy, we don’t have even middling fatalities from this when 12,000 die per month from normally-occurring causes of mortality, but we must at least eradicate this threat – we have to get something from this.” And then, alas, a late-breaking Navy cluster (navy, armed services and their contacts – some 600+ cases!), isolated as it was, threw the optics of eradication out the window. This didn’t help the official narrative, as the armed services – almost uniquely here – were in charge of the management and administration of this curious home-brew curfew.
The South Asia Paradox
The French paradox is often cited in dieting circles. The French consume large amounts of fat, cream, drink wine, still manage to enjoy their croissants and still live longer than their nutritionally-paranoid American counterparts; they are more slender, and infuriatingly haughty about the whole thing. Or so the story goes.
Immunologically, it seems there is a South Asian paradox, but it may extend beyond South Asia, to SE Asia and perhaps even to Africa. When a Nepalese was asked about their seemingly-charmed COVID-19 immunity and what the secret was, the answer was, “Bad hygiene.” There may be something to that.
South Asia has 23% of the world’s population, and roughly 0.5% of the world’s COVID-19 fatalities. More Vitamin D from enriched sunlight may play a part (hence the silliness of locking people away from it), but also, doubtless, immune systems hardened by lack of hygiene and food less-than-ideally stored that brings with them viruses, pathogens and strains of this and that, and more. When the Spanish flu raged, more than 20% of the global fatalities came from India. So, has something shifted? Have parts of the world so infantilized their immune systems?
Again, Sri Lanka, rather than leveraging its membership in these “elite” immunological circles, seemed hell-bent on punishing itself paradoxically for low fatalities by imposing the most punitive restrictions to economic functioning and social wellbeing upon itself. And then, when fatalities didn’t rise, post hoc ergo propter hoc came into full play: they congratulated themselves for their deft handling! If you then point out that countries with far less of a lockdown – or none – have fewer deaths still, including Taiwan and Hong Kong and Vietnam which never had any extended curfews and all with still-functioning economies, then fact-free outrage and sputtering contumely are rarely far behind.
A Smattering of Other Confusions
Writing unremittingly here throughout and seeking to relay the findings from such astute sober expertise as Dr. David Katz, Professor John Ioannidis, Knutt Wittowski (savaged and censored for promoting the “heresy” that sunlight and air might help, and it may be time to end this charade, go outdoors, and let our immune systems do what they are designed to), I found that such prosaic sanity fell flat in face of the torrential media hysteria that has been so forthcoming worldwide.
The same fatuous “economy vs. lives” bosh did the rounds here, until growing economic desperation, mass failures of SMEs, devastating layoffs in the apparel and tourism sectors (the life-blood of this economy) finally brought home the incontestable reality that the economy is lives, and that economic bankruptcy is not a medical strategy.
Confounding communication still held sway, however. The recent relaxing of curfew strictures are a prime example. We were officially told that businesses can be open, but that people should only venture out for work or to buy essentials. So, if you are a customer-facing business outside this “essential” sphere, being “open” means what, precisely?
Hotels had been advised they can “open”, but no restaurants, bars, health clubs, etc. Since no one is travelling in or out, if you could somehow transport yourself to an “open” hotel, what would you do there? Play a round of lawn tennis? No, actually – not yet allowed, either!
Clarity of communication, therefore, is so needed, and has been so globally missing. It was glaringly deficient in the UK Prime Minister’s rather incoherent, generic and inconclusive recent statement. It certainly is in short supply in the rambling pyrotechnics over the many weeks of the “Trump show” masquerading as a briefing. Such clarity becomes crucial in order to stress-test policy, to enroll support and to engage people – rather than to seek to bully and browbeat them, or to “order” them to do what you seemingly cannot persuade, much less inspire them to do.
And then there is Colombo, the capital city, which accounts for roughly 50% of GDP. The argument for keeping it curfewed has been that it was deemed “high risk”. This was not based on the number of actual cases but because of population density.
Tokyo has had roughly 160 deaths among 12 million people, Hong Kong has had 4 deaths among just under 8 million, the province of Sindh (which includes the teeming Pakistani city of Karachi) has about 45 million people and has had about 299 deaths. In New York, it was not Manhattan that was the epicentre of fatalities, but – other than in nursing homes – it was the economically-underprivileged areas of the Bronx and Queens that had the biggest surges. These statistics certainly throw the concept into question; but even beyond that, Colombo has 750,000 people and has only had 155 cases attributed to it (“cases” not “fatalities”). One has to blush to say it’s “high risk”.
Circuit Breaker
Hong Kong and Singapore have used versions of this, so has New Zealand. It is simply the argument for evidence-based thresholds and differing strategies, bowing to that evidence rather than prefabricated ideological fault lines.
So, you track types of cases, number of cases, growth of cases, nature of cases (isolated, local, community, imported) and then determine which strategies of suppression, mitigation, isolation or quarantining apply to each such “level”, how much of the economy and our mobility and personal discretion is temporarily suppressed in each, etc., and then you apply these strategies, based on evidence, to a street, a neighborhood, a city, a district, a region, and – only in exceptional circumstances – to a whole country.
Even the UN clearly stipulated that any such intrusion in our lives should be carefully targeted and for a limited period of time, and should be as minimally invasive as possible. I wonder how many varietals of intervention would pass that test globally.
But such an assessment – such a clearly-stated set of containment and mitigation strategies, triggered by evidentiary thresholds that have been debated and clearly shared – should surely precede even a single day of lockdown being imposed and asserted, otherwise.
In short, evidence-based thresholds, including a review of the types of cases (so you do not treat nursing home outbreaks the same way as widespread community transmission), each triggering distinctive, focused, brief, targeted strategies – and not some shibollethic “five tests” created by dubious witch-doctors – should actually guide policy and decisions.
Lanka, Calibration and Breaking News!
Everyone wants Lanka to win: it is a warm, charming, inviting place with a captivating culture, but there are turbulent, choppy political waters ahead. And there is what this reveals about gullibility and aversion to evidence; but Lanka is not unique on those fronts, just more acutely afflicted given how little the data has merited the over-reaction here.
Sri Lanka’s economic bungee-jump-without-the-bungee is a tale less about COVID-19 and more about how we can undermine our sense of balance and operational sanity, and how we can be seduced by the siren call of herd panic. We, as a human family, have somehow to outgrow our aversion to the inescapable leadership imperative of assessing the cost-benefit implications of our choices, being able to sift the essential from the incidental.
No one would – in that clarifying light – opt to destroy their economy and society over errant speculation, rather than opting for ongoing, careful, fact-based course correction as we march towards some clearly-defined and credible aim.
We have been advised here in Lanka now (and naysayers say this is as much about an upcoming election as COVID-19, but it is economically on the side of the angels nonetheless) that as of May 26th, a night curfew from 10pm to 4am will apply to the whole island. We are “at liberty” otherwise.
We shall continue to whittle away, hoping each day that facts and human values – and not COVID-19 “theology” – can increasingly hold sway.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Something about the normalisation of these AI-generated images makes me nervous. We don’t need them as headline banners on Daily Sceptic. Let’s focus on the real, please.
Putin killed Navalny eventually then. Very sad to hear this.
P.S I like the picture above. Better than policemen in rainbow unitards. It’s eerie, atmospheric and has scary movie vibes about it.
”Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has DIED in prison.
The 47 year old, who was reportedly subjected to torture whilst being imprisoned, 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, was arguably Putin’s biggest critic.
In a video appearance last month he appeared gaunt and frail, with his head shaved.
The Russian prison where he died has claimed he “felt unwell after a walk and almost immediately lost consciousness”.
Several media outlets have been speculating that his death could well be an ‘assassination’ and a move by Putin to silence his main opposition once and for all.
In 2020, Nalavny fell into a coma with suspected novichok poisoning- carried out by Russias FSB.
His death comes as Putin is running his re-election campaign in a month to remain President.”
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1758478532823461932
This is terrible news for the Russian people. Tall, blond, courageous, Ethnic Russian Nalavny, with his wonderful sense of humour and his tall, blond Russian wife and family, represented everything that Tiny Tatar Putin hates.
The whole Russian-Ukrainian Fake War was set up by Tiny Tatar Putin & his secret ally Tiny Zionist Zelensky with one objective: to kill off as many Ethnic Russians and Ethnic Ukrainian men as possible. Putin could easily have crushed Ukraine at once, but that was never the purpose of the little genocidal ruse cooked up between the two leaders, whose aim is to drag it out as long as possible, and kill as many Ethnic European men as possible. Now Tiny Tatar Putin is conscripting even 70-year-old Russians to be sent to their deaths, so the state doesn’t have to pay their pensions.
As others have said, Nalavny should have directed opposition from abroad, instead of going back to Russia and certain imprisonment by the Fiend Putin, who reportedly enjoyed watching videos of Nalavny being beaten, starved and tortured in prison. I hope Brazilian Patriot Jair Bolsonaro, the true President of Brazil, will not suffer a similar fate, after Evil Communist Lula’s previous attempts to assassinate him.
“Tiny Tatar”
I certainly agree regarding Bolsonaro.
I wonder where Daily Sceptic found 15 people to tick in defence of almost certain murder of the principal opposition leader.
Anybody who thinks the Nalvany affair is about a simple principled opposition leader doesn’t belong on DS. Nothing is that simple when you see daily to what lengths the West is willing to go to weaken Putin and Russia.
WHAT?????
Anyone who disagrees with you “doesn’t belong on DS”?????
Ever heard of FREEDOM OF SPEECH and the
FREE SPEECH UNION? Who the blazes do you think you are?
I would say that with an attitude like yours it’s you who doesn’t belong on DS. Normal, rational people have the ability to tolerate others with a different viewpoint without inferring they should sling their hook. Apparently that description doesn’t apply to you!
I am sorry you took my comment personally, it was meant figuratively. DS is normally a site where people are skeptical of the official narrative. That is all. I welcome all comments and opinions and do not wish to bar anybody.
Are MP’s living standards affected or will they continue to award themselves pay increases and use expenses to try and maintain their lifestyle, changing legislation if needs be to be benefit themselves?
Then there’s helping out their friends to make sure they also do well and perhaps provide some work if being an MP doesn’t work out.
I can’t imagine Rishi Sunak is too concerned about living standards except as a negative headline.
Standard of living is directly tied to price and availability of energy. NET ZERO puts up the price and makes energy less available. ——Net Zero is therefore the opposite of prosperity and it lowers standard of living. —–It has been obvious for a very long time that our own politicians pander to the Marxist ideology of the UN and WEF. who freely admit that the lifestyles of the affluent middle classes in western society are “unsustainable”. —-They will never tell you that their plan is to remove prosperity because let’s face it, who is ever going to vote for that, so they give you weasel words instead, like “fairness, climate justice, living wage for all (even those who choose not to work), gender and racial equality, and every other Marxist goal all packed as “Sustainable Development”
Yes but I definitely think that a white man masquerading as a woman whilst trying to look official talking about how climate change is racist will likely change your mind;
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1758487108073685344
Whilst buying my last two houses I always sort the advice a trans admiral to avoid the old poverty/climate trap! Who doesn’t?
Makes me think of Aristotle’s claim that democracy would be a futile way of government because the multitude would sooner or later always fall for a demagogue.
And wasn’t it Plato who said true democracy only works in a small, ethnically homogenous society?
Exactly.
Unfortunately Noah Carl appears to still believe in our electoral system when the reality is that it is a complete sham. Fishy was moved in to place in order to bring about precisely the collapse in living standards that are discussed in this article. It does not require the brightest brains to explain that massive hikes in fuel prices are going to impoverish the country. This means of course that even foppish Fishy knows what he is doing and therefore the conclusion must be that he is acting deliberately. In fact he is simply carrying out orders. So when Noah warns that matters will get worse under Labour he is absolutely correct but for the wrong reasons because Kneel has all but admitted he is a WEF stooge.
The Davos Deviants are wholly committed to the destruction of this country and they have people in place to ensure this happens – Fishy and Chunt, Kneel guided by Bliar and Davey who is so away with the faeries he can be safely left alone as a vaguely supporting actor and anyway he is so far away from power that hell really will freeze over before he gets sight of any keys to Downing St.
The degree of naivety displayed by some DS writers is at times awe inspiring.
Yep you got it in one. ——-I like the DS because we can all say what we are thinking pretty much unlike eg on Mailonline and other places, but I am mystified how you received 3 red thumbs down ——–I don’t expect everyone to agree with me but I get a lot of people doing a red thumbs down but they never seem to say why they disagree. They just do the thumbs down and vanish. —-What are they so scared of? ——-Hey you guys c’mon no one is going to bite your head off …Speak Freely.
varmint, I reckon I have about three regular trolls who always down vote. I couldn’t care less.
Yep. —–Often on the comments I make on climate there will be thumbs up and maybe one thumbs down. ——-I have no problem with any amount of thumbs down, but those people should say why they do the thumbs down. Or is it that they have no confidence in their argument?
It’s deliberate, they blew coal fired power stations and replaced with windmills. Who thought that would improve living standards?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGdprwXXMAAkYDm?format=jpg&name=small
In a very short few decades we went from Thatcher being crucified for wanting to shut down mines to the entire political class wanting to do so and being praised from the rooftops for it.
Noah Carl’s article on the lowering of British living standards reminds me that this lowering has been going on since 1952, according to two eye-opening articles.
“From a historical point of view the idea that ‘diversity built Britain’, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is bizarre. Until 1952 Britain was the richest country in Europe, after which we massively fell behind our continental rivals – so if diversity did ‘build’ the country, it didn’t do a great job.”
—from “The Windrush Myth” by Ed West
The Windrush myth | The Spectator
“1952 was the start of Elizabeth II’s reign. The Windrush Illegal Human Trafficking Operation was in 1948. The Commonwealth was created in 1949. From the original 8 members, it now has 56, mostly Third World countries receiving foreign aid from UK taxpayers.” [Bizarrely, former French African colonies Gabon & Togo were allowed to join the Commonwealth in 2022, and more Francophone African countries are expected to join later, all then demanding cash from UK Taxpayers]
—See “Elizabeth II’s Devotion to the Commonwealth” by Robert Hardman here:
Elizabeth II’s devotion to the Commonwealth | The Spectator
I think he’s placing that seriously too late. Until the first world war, Britain was the foremost money lender on the planet and everybody else was indebted to it, especially the mostly rural backwater country called USA. Then came Lloyd George’s mad rush to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary (and Russia and Turkey in the process) at any cost which turned the USA, where plenty of workers were available as the country wasn’t actively participating in the war before 1917/18, into a huge ammunitions factory to enable Britain and France to buy the absolutely insane numbers of artillery shells spent during the futile mass slaughter & destruction happenings on the western front. And this, they did with money borrowed from American bankers, leading to a reverse of the original situation.
“British Living Standards Are Going Down”
Britain is going down! fast
It is not the Conservatives who should blame themselves. It is the British people who should blame the political class.
So who do I vote for?
My political leaning is slightly right of centre, and I am a firm believer of personal freedom and self determination.
The Conservative Party has been appalling, and Labour will likely be worse (if that is possible).
Unless there is some unison of disgruntled voters like me, Labour will be in power.
Is it possible to unite for change?
After the last 14 years, and particularly the last 4, you’d think the Not-a-Conservative-Party had deliberately set out to self-destruct.
Labour will take up the baton and run with it. ——–If there were an Impoverishment Olympics the UK would be well featured on the winners podium