Not even the keen national attention which, at this moment, is focussed on Guyana’s political circumstances, has been able to cause the nation to overlook the fact that having ‘done its rounds’ elsewhere, the coronavirus has paid us a decidedly unwelcome visit.
It is usually the awareness of a lack of capacity to respond to challenges that often triggers the kinds of responses that we see in countries which, on account of their inherent weaknesses, are inclined to respond in ways that frequently exacerbate rather than remedy.
After it had been officially announced that a woman who had arrived in Guyana a week earlier from the United States had become the country’s first coronavirus fatality, the knee jerk public response here was deliberate and to some extent, damaging. Driven by the understanding that the chances of contracting the virus could be minimised, as far as possible, by creating pockets of sanitized bubbles, people began to take local supplies’ outlets by storm, emptying shelves of an assortment of products (Lysol appears to have been the priority product) and triggering almost instant unhelpful responses like the removal of in-demand goods from shelves, rationing, and in some instances, a swift outbreak of outrageous price-gouging – pursuits that inevitably retarded the efficiency of the supply chain. It took the country’s Business Support Organizations an inordinately lengthy period of time before they responded with a routine admonition of the transgressions that appeared to make no difference.
Before Guyana’s first victim had been recorded, there had already been a fair awareness, mostly through international media, of the behaviour of the virus, particularly, the fact that it had reportedly originated in China, before spreading, apparently rapidly, to various other parts the world. Human victims apart, what was also clear was that the virus had also sunk its claws into to global economy mainly by seriously compromising travel and by extension the efficient movement of people, goods and services around the world; so that we are aware now of its troubling portents for the country that have to do with the fact that we are underdeveloped, under-resourced and in those particular senses, worryingly vulnerable.
It is the same with the rest of the region. The losses to the economies of those countries that depend mostly on the vicissitudes of international travel are becoming increasingly apparent. The World Travel and Tourism (WTTC) has already projected that COVID-19 could claim 50 million jobs, (a number that is scarcely believable) in the tourism sector in its wake. Many of those will come from countries in the Caribbean and there is no telling if and when they will recover from a blow that threatens to match, the impact of some of the more recent natural disasters that the islands of the Caribbean have had to face.
In Guyana’s particular instance there is the threat of a slowdown in the investment-related ‘head of steam’ that appeared to have been building against the backdrop of the country’s transformational oil find. The likely extent of the impact and how long a recovery period we will have to endure are both unknown quantities at this time.
There is, of course, the much more worrying phenomenon of the health impact in a region where the tools with which to fend off a virus sufficiently formidable in its impact to have caused US President Donald Trump to declare that the US was facing a “national emergency,” are virtually non-existent. Up until now the response of our health services, as far as we know, has been confined largely to providing status reports and monitoring people for symptoms. Those pursuits, accompanied by periodic appeals to sanitize and to steer clear of fairly large assemblies have been pretty much the sum of what our health services have had to offer. All too often, helplessness is a bedfellow of underdevelopment.
For obvious reasons we have taken a look at events in our ‘backyard,’ the United States, where power and material development have not spared the country this undiscriminating and unwelcome visitor. There are times when basic fears cannot be assuaged even by official safety net assurances. There have been reliable reports of panic buying, hoarding and a significantly elevated demand for products associated with efforts to ward off the virus… so much so that President Trump himself, bewilderingly, has had to take to the media to urge Americans not to empty the shelves of outlets.
So that the immediate health and economic challenges of the coronavirus aside, (and these may well turn out to be challenges that seriously stretch the resilience of our coping mechanisms) it serves, as well, as a reminder of how much ‘on the edge’ we live and of the importance of ensuring that we not miss the opportunity that we have been offered to invest seriously in institutions and tools that are critical to reducing if not removing altogether some of our most critical vulnerabilities as a nation.
