The ongoing debate on Restarting the Economy in the Midst of the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic
Posted on 25 May 2020; 11:00 PM IST. Last Updated 25 May 2020; 11:00 PM IST.Summary: The novel coronavirus (covid-19) caused massive lockdowns all across the globe. The virus was not eliminated, but it was isolated or contained by lockdowns and social distancing. In the absence of a drug to ward off the virus, restarting the economy is fraught with several challenges. This article provides some insights into possible strategies and models, that may be employed in restarting the economies.
Restarting the economy in the midst of the novel coronavirus (covid-19) is fraught with several challenges, and administrators are plagued by a complex set of issues, and delicate balances. There are many strategies and models for restarting the economies, and some of these are discussed in detail in this article.
Strategies for Combating Novel Coronavirus
The following two strategies seem to have already been employed, all across the world.
a) Semi Isolation Strategy: A country can be divided into states or provinces, and each state or province can be further sub-divided into counties or districts. The semi isolation strategy allows movement of goods across the districts, but restricts the movement of people across the districts. This semi isolation prevents spread of the virus across districts.
b) Periodic Monitoring Strategy: The aim of periodic monitoring is to detect and contain the virus as early as possible. An elaborate explanation of this strategy is available at this link.
Models for Combating Novel Coronavirus
The strategies available to an administrator can be deployed in a wide variety of scenarios. A model simply tells us how the strategies are employed, in a particular scenario. The following models are widely debated.
a) Full Restart Model: The full restart model prescribes starting all economic activities, but individual states or provinces could still implement semi isolation strategy, with mandatory periodic monitoring. Despite all these necessary precautions, this model has the following deficiencies, which are hard to address or resolve.
i) Restarting all economic activities would require public services like transport, which would act as a common meeting ground for otherwise divergent communities.
ii) Schools are another place, which could act as a common meeting ground for divergent communities, and children are significant contributors for the spread of flu.
iii) asymptomatic transmissions could simply explode, as periodic monitoring may be grossly insufficient, and it is impossible to monitor all people, all the time.
b) Staggered Restart Model: In staggered restart, economic activities are restarted in a phased manner. This model is better than full start, but still has the following deficiencies -
i) public services like transport, restaurants will be required, which could increase the possibility of virus infections.
ii) asymptomatic transmissions could take place, and periodic monitoring may be insufficient.
Traditional models, such as those described above, may be insufficient to deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic. A different thought process, may be needed to handle this disease, which has assumed gigantic proportions. The rest of this article describes a new thought process.
To begin with, we take a random country and examine its societies. Most countries would have two societies -
a) Defence b) Civilian
Clearly, the isolation strategy employed here was by function, as well as by region or space.
We can use this principle, and device a model, where a region would promote work communities, by function. For example, we could have manufacturing communities, distribution communities, public service communities, agricultural communities, etc.
A simple way to put this principle is, "employees will live close to their workplace, and without a long commute (within a 2 mile radius)". This may require a sacrifice of family/social life or require regional transfers, but it helps countries to run their economies, until the vaccine arrives. From the perspective of employees, it increases their confidence, and also of their family left behind, which can be assured of regular income.
A large manufacturing plant could have several small "manufacturing communities", living close to the plant, and without commute or direct interaction with other societies.
A small branch of a bank could create a small "public service" community, close to its branch, to serve a small region. This could serve the vendor community, which in turn serves the distribution community, which in turn serves the consumers of the region.
Typically, small businesses (vendors), and distribution communities, are part of unorganized sector, and these communities must be established and monitored by the government. Aggregators may be encouraged to establish and maintain work communities.
Some activities like schools and colleges will remain out of scope, because students can come from different communities. Since there are a very large number of e-learning platforms, these courses can be considered as equivalent to regular course work.
Creating a work community will require some time (quarantine) and effort (medical testing), but the investment could reap higher dividends. It is hoped that the ideas presented here could be useful to administrators or promote another wave of new ideas.