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Coronavirus pandemic
OpinionComment
Philip Bowring
Philip Bowring

Opinion | Road accidents are likely to kill more people than coronavirus. The world needs to keep perspective

  • Rich communities can fund collapsing businesses for a while. But can the developing world really enforce coronavirus lockdowns?
  • A balance should be struck between the threat of one disease and the social cost of measures against it

Reading Time:3 minutes
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Migrant workers and their families board a truck in Ahmedabad on March 25 to return to their villages after India orders a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of Covid-19. Photo: Reuters
Philip Bowring

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

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Less than 50 years after poet John Donne wrote those words, in 1665 London was struck by the plague. In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe vividly described the cries of the starving, unemployed due to the closure of businesses, and the flight to the countryside of those who could.

Today we find countries around the world closing their borders to each other – though all have the virus. What makes sense for one country breeds catastrophe when most do it. Let us not fool ourselves into believing either that closures and lockdowns are sustainable, or that they work other than in the very short term.
Can we in Hong Kong believe that two weeks of border closure can solve the problem when two things are already obvious from the limited data available?
Firstly, we still have little idea of how widespread the virus is. Even countries like South Korea, Germany and Australia, with high numbers of tests per million, have tested only a small proportion. Korea, for example, has tested 348,000 people, or 6,800 per million; Hong Kong and Japan have tested a fraction of that; Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia, almost none. China does not release such figures, nor Singapore, Egypt and so on.

The rate of positives varies widely and it is difficult to draw conclusions from data which ranges from around 1 per cent in Australia to nearly 20 per cent in Italy. Death rates also range from around 1.5 per cent in Korea to nearly 10 per cent in Italy. There are many unknowns, including test quality.

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