“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 8. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Nabarro pointed to the collateral damage that lockdowns are having worldwide, especially among poorer populations.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.
“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe, actually,” he said. “And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it, work together and learn from each other, but remember—lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.
We have had to cancel two vacations to economies that really depend on tourism. Covid-19 is destroying so many developing nations. And many nations that clamped down hard like Canada and Europe are showing big hits to their economy, for instance, Canada has much higher unemployment than the US.
WSJ had a piece today where both the UK and the US are trying to figure out ways to get the London/NYC flights flowing smoothly. This might be done with fast testing and some other innovations. We have a trip to London scheduled for June 2021. Would be a real bummer if our two weeks in Great Britain were only spent in a hotel room.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
