Were we allowed to go to a pub, there’d be two questions dominating every discussion: just how long will the lockdown last, and can our economy survive it? (Actually, there’s a third question, but no-one knows quite what went wrong with Fikile Mbalula — it’s a mystery for the ages).
On the lockdown, the smart money says it’ll be extended. Research this week by the Paternoster Group, a political risk consultancy headed by the redoubtable Richard Calland, puts the odds of the lockdown being extended at 50%. "To be successful, [a lockdown] needs to be coupled with the ‘Four T’ strategy of ‘Trace, Test, Track and Treat’ that the government has developed in the past fortnight ... [but it] hasn’t yet been able to roll out the programme in a manner that is cast sufficiently widely to achieve the main purpose of the lockdown," it warns.
By contrast, the Paternoster Group reckons there’s just a 5% chance the lockdown will be lifted on April 16. "This is the least likely option. Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere for a while, and in all probability, neither are you."
More plausible even (with a 30% probability), is the idea of a middle ground: lifting the most restrictive measures "to avoid the economy ossifying completely", while being prepared to return to a full lockdown should infection rates start to rocket. In this scenario, expect a curfew instead of a lockdown, a wider definition of "essential goods" so more people can go back to work, and the chance to stack up on more wine and whisky.
The question, though, is what is the best thing to do?
The US has the sort of balance sheet to keep everyone inside for many months. SA doesn’t
Many people, obviously, are rightly anguished at just how searingly bad the lockdown has been for the economy. They point to Sweden as one example of a country that has decided to wait and keep its economy open. It’s similar, effectively, to the "herd immunity" experiment which Boris Johnson initially flirted with in the UK.
Only, Sweden isn’t looking so hot right now. The death rate is rising rapidly: on Monday 76 Swedes died — its highest number yet of that country’s daily fatalities.
Last week, the Lancet journal wrote: "The initial slow response in countries such as the UK, the US and Sweden now looks increasingly poorly judged. As leaders scramble to acquire diagnostic tests, personal protective equipment and ventilators for overwhelmed hospitals, there is a growing sense of anger."
It added that there was an initial patchwork of harmful reactions from some leaders: from denial and misplaced optimism to passive acceptance of large-scale deaths.
Thankfully, SA can’t be accused of any of that. Which is just as well — we don’t exactly have the latitude that Sweden has to indulge flights of policy whimsy.
And yet, there are numerous ill-informed calls to lift the lockdown entirely, as of right now.
Last week, Just One Lap founder Simon Brown sneered at someone who said that "freezing the economy will certainly kill more people". "Based on what? A blog of a wealth manager? Maybe we should let the health-care professionals figure this out," Brown replied.
Jean Pierre Verster, who runs Protea Capital Management and is one of the smartest investors around, says a common logical fallacy is to imagine that it’s an either/or situation. "It’s not as if option a) is that we don’t have a lockdown, people die and the economy is fine, and option b) is we close the economy to save lives. In fact, a likely scenario is that if you don’t have a lockdown, you’ll have people die and the economy could take a worse knock."
In the Swedish example, he says, you risk a situation where hospitals are so overrun that not only can’t they cope with the virus, they’re also unable to deal with routine events like accidents or cancer treatments. "I don’t think we should be running this kind of experiment on our populace, given our frailties in this country," he says.
But equally, you can’t lock down your country for a year and hope to still have much of an economy left.
Paul Romer, who won the Nobel prize for economics, wrote in The New York Times this week that the US lockdown should, within a few months, shift to a targeted approach that "limits the spread of the virus but still lets most people go back to work". His proposal is: get 25% of workers back within two months, 75% back within four.
This is the middle ground. And it’s complicated: his scenario relies on widespread rollout of protective equipment to shield those who haven’t had the virus, as well as far smarter, frequent, targeted testing.
Paul Krugman, another Nobel prize-winning economist, argues that the US economy is in "a medically induced coma, in which some brain functions are temporarily shut down to give the patient a chance to heal".
What needs to happen, he says, is that the government must provide life support — in the form of disaster relief, as cash — to keep the patient alive.
But the US has the sort of balance sheet to keep everyone inside for many months. SA doesn’t. Of course, we haven’t seen the scale of human apocalypse that the US has either. If we’re lucky (and partly thanks to our early lockdown), we might not.
However, as the Lancet journal points out, we did need a lockdown. In the end, though, the economics might dictate that SA takes the middle ground of partially lifting it sooner rather than later.
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