Philip Bowring

Opinion | Fight against the coronavirus is embroiled in a ‘fog of war’, with the poor becoming collateral damage

The divergences in testing targets, reliability and reporting across countries mean the data is often misleading

Meanwhile, the poor suffer disproportionately during lockdowns and their living conditions make them vulnerable to the disease

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A man walks past a mural in Milan on March 16. While several countries, including Italy, imposed lockdowns to halt the spread of Covid-19, these hit the poor hardest. Photo: EPA-EFE

Philip Bowring

Published: 9:00am, 19 Apr 2020Updated: 9:19am, 19 Apr 2020

“War is too important to be left to the generals,” remarked a prime minister concerned about keeping field commanders from seeking small victories at massive cost. Likewise, leaders today must listen to and question not only the virologists and epidemiologists, but also the economists, unions and employer groups, social workers and ordinary people who have their own risk/reward calculations. Only then can they make decisions on behalf of the societies they govern.

The expert views are sometimes contradictory, and constantly changing as new facts emerge. Much weight is placed on data, which is often unreliable. Differences from country to country are so extreme that they cannot be measuring the same thing to the same extent.

“The fog of war” applies to the Covid-19 pandemic as much as to any military conflict.

Many are suggesting the world will have to wait for a vaccine or effective antiviral medicine before life can begin to return to the old normal. This shows touching faith in finding the “silver bullet”, a faith daily enhanced by announcements of drug trials.

But what if it takes six years, not six months? Even a breakthrough drug cannot quickly be made available to enough of the 7.6 billion population to break the cycle of infection. Nor can half those people go into lockdown without famines and the breakdown of systems which enable societies – including distribution of medicines – to function.

Opinion | Fight against the coronavirus is embroiled in a ‘fog of war’, with the poor becoming collateral damage

The divergences in testing targets, reliability and reporting across countries mean the data is often misleading Meanwhile, the poor suffer disproportionately during lockdowns and their living conditions make them vulnerable to the disease

The divergences in testing targets, reliability and reporting across countries mean the data is often misleading

Meanwhile, the poor suffer disproportionately during lockdowns and their living conditions make them vulnerable to the disease