The Government is mishandling the pandemic

Mar 26, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The funeral parlours are doing brisk business as a result of the pandemic. Four more COVID-19 deaths were reported in Guyana yesterday.
And still there have been no calls for a lockdown in the country. People are experiencing a sense of fatalism about what is happening. Many are unbothered by the threat posed by the pandemic locally, while those who are concerned feel helpless that nothing they say or do will be taken seriously by the authorities and even by the media.
A media worker died yesterday. But her death is not going to change the indifference being shown by most local media houses to the spate of deaths and infections over the past two weeks. Not one local media house has issued an editorial or front page comment calling for a lockdown of the country to stem the high incidence of new cases and the rush of new deaths.
It is almost certain that no media house, at present, is going to support the re-imposition of previous social restrictions which have long been placed in abeyance. There is absolutely little support in civil society for a tightening of the social restrictions.
This lack of empathy is appalling. And it is coinciding with a damning report, which suggests that hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided in the United States had there been an earlier lockdown. Reuter News Agency is reporting that an economics professor has estimated that COVID-19 deaths, which now stand at 540,000, could have been below 300,000 if the country had earlier adopted social distancing measures, testing protocols and the wearing of masks. Other news agencies have reported on the model which was developed by the professor and which now estimates a further 100,000 deaths.
But the same lesson which is now being touted in the United States can apply to Guyana. When the PPP/C took office there were only 20 deaths. They had to have known that the rate at which they were reopening the economy and the failure to enforce social restrictions would have led to deaths. This is not a no-brainer. It is hard to imagine the PPP/C pretending that it did not predict increases deaths.
As it stands, we are not yet in to eight months of the PPP/C rule and a further 200 persons have died, or 10 times the amount of deaths which occurred under the APNU+AFC. While it is true that testing was low under the APNU+AFC, if there were indeed massive amounts of unreported cases, the death rate would have been much higher. The PPP/C’s explanation for this is that there was suppression of data. But where is the evidence of this criminal act? We are yet to see it.
The PPP/C has mismanaged the pandemic. And it is now going into overdrive to further manhandle the situation. The response to the vaccines has been abysmally poor. Only around 25,000 persons have been vaccinated since the immunization began almost two weeks now. This means that the majority of persons over 60 years have not been vaccinated and this is considered the high-risk group. But instead of trying to get to these persons, the government is now opening up the campaign to a much larger demographic: those above 40 years old.
The 40-50 years age group consists of about 150,000 persons. This would require 300,000 jabs since vaccines have to be saved for the second dose. Even if the first tranche of Russian vaccines arrives, there will not be sufficient to vaccinate all in this age group.
The government is now attempting to vaccinate as many persons as possible since its efforts to target the high-risk groups have been slowed by vaccine hesitancy. But the government’s strategy will lead to more deaths rather than less deaths. And more cases rather than less cases.
The persons who are going to be vaccinated will be those who are likely to be taking precautions and thus have a reduced risk of infection and disease. And those who are not coming forward to be vaccinated are those believing the conspiracy theories on social media. They are the same ones who are more likely to be infected.
In the meantime, the numbers keep rising. And like Donald Trump did in the United States, the PPP/C government is making the same mistakes by not taking early and decisive social distancing and social restrictions.
But then again who cares? Not the media, not the political parties, not the civil society organizations and definitely not the business community.
The voices of those who care are not being heard. They are helpless and hopeless in the face of the indifference shown by Big Brother government.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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