As this newspaper has already said in its editorial columns, there was something unsettling about last week’s rebuke by WHO/PAHO local representative Dr. William Adu-Krow over what he appears to believe is a serious delinquency in sections of the population with regard to advice given by some of the world’s foremost medical authorities about practicing social distancing as a possible means of minimizing the spread of the coronavirus. In our opinion the message seeks to target, in different ways, both the general populace and the authorities Evidently not wishing that his point be simply glossed over Dr. Adu-Krow went to the length of openly advocating a ‘lockdown’ if we continue to disregard the social distancing refrain. That was his unmistakably blunt way of getting over what he wanted to say with equal levels of clarity and impact that only fools could misread. Incidentally, implicit in what Dr. Adu-Krow had to say is the implication, intended or otherwise, that we have arrived at a juncture where more material and intellectual resources must be spent on a structured national COVID-19 public awareness initiative if only because it appears that neither the level nor the nature of the public response may, in some ways, be as close as we would want it to be matching the extent of the threat.
Contextually, it should be noted that in Trinidad and Tobago, where, it seems, there has also been some measure of resistance to the coronavirus warnings, the authorities have moved to take some more robust enforcement measures.
That being said the announcement late last week of limited lockdowns, notably in Linden and in some adjoining communities (enforcing those lockdowns will, of course pose their own challenges) and the more limited, time-bound restrictions on public movement that have now been put in place in the capital, may suggest that there has been some measure of official response to what Dr. Adu-Krow had to say.
But who do we Guyanese think we are, anyway? Quite why we appear to be experiencing some level of resistance to the social distancing refrain may have to do with one of two factors, or, perhaps, a combination of the two. The first has to do with what has always been a kind of national pouting with which many Guyanese respond to official directives that have to do with what they believe to be the curtailment of ‘freedoms.’ It is a response that is usually manifested in feigned expressions of hurt and horror, a mindset that subsumes directives that derive from state authorities, however important those directives might be, beneath what they perceive to be their inalienable rights. That knee-jerk perspective, mind you, is, frequently, decidedly lacking in logic, ignoring as it frequently does, the fact that the exigencies of national security, whatever that may mean at any given point in time, empowers the authorities to have those ‘rights’ to be removed, at least for a period of time.
The second trait is even more dangerous. It reposes in what sometimes appears to be a mind-boggling and widespread conviction on our part, that – both as individuals and as a nation – we possess some God-given ability to ‘dodge the bullet,’ so to speak, so that, all too frequently, (as might well be the case to some extent in this instance) justification of directives located in robust precedent found elsewhere is still considered insufficient to have us to alter our mindsets.
We possess, for example, a particular proclivity for resisting official restraints on our ability to entertain ourselves as we please (the blowback to government’s 2015 implementation of a curfew on the opening of bars bears this out) which is why some bars, restaurants and liming spots have been surreptitiously ignoring the refrain.
In some measure, too, the indifference, if you will, suggests that there are sections of our society (perhaps the numbers might be greater than we think) are not as ideally positioned as they ought to be to enable the message to be suitably impactful, so that the sheer scale of the national challenge that the Coronavirus poses might is still not yet be fully grasped. In that circumstance, upping the spread, clarity and the intensity of the message becomes a matter of national priority and a responsibility, first and foremost, of the health authorities.
The naked realities are that the coronavirus is real, and that it is indifferent to those physical borders that we have created. It can disfigure, physically, materially and psychologically, societies in ways that can change the way we live, forever. That, coming to think of it, is now a very real possibility. The virus has the tools at its disposal to take us there.
Witness the fact that it has already nonchalantly torn down our territorial fences and terrified us into hastily creating new and equally fragile national partitions by closing our airports and seaports, for how long we really have no clue. In its awesomeness it reminds us of those hideous Comic Book monsters from which puny humans take panic-stricken but pointless flight.
America has pronounced on the virus. It has described it as a “national emergency.” That condition speaks to such acutely life-threatening conditions as war, invasion, general insurrection, disorder, natural disaster or other “public emergency” and must therefore be addressed through what, sometimes are not the most palatable of means, “if the ordinary laws and government powers are not sufficient to restore peace and order.” We might well ask ourselves whether the threat level of a globally rampaging coronavirus, deemed by the powers that be in Washington to be something in the nature of a “national emergency,” that threat level might not apply in considerably greater measure here in Guyana.
