Anatomy Of A Lockdown

Anatomy of a Lockdown

by Sachin V Gopalan

“No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not entirely own us. It can't take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action.” ― Ryder Carroll

We today are in the midst of World War 3. Instead of a war between countries, we are at war with a virus in a bizarre sci-fi plot where humanity is fighting a near-alien non-living species. And to top it off, this situation is rapidly evolving into an economic war between countries that is replete with geo-political strategy and tactics on a daily basis.

World Wars are a time for accelerated human casualties, both physical and social. The havoc it wrecks on the global and local economy is often unimaginable. This time again, our enemy is another human being, who if “armed” with the virus, could kill us if he comes too close. Yes, the virus cannot come to us uninvited, it needs a carrier body to bring it to us, and that makes it the greatest stealth weapon ever. To fight back, its not our soldiers who are at the frontline, but its our doctors, nurses and medical workers. Who would have imagined that such a Hollywood-esque scenario would one day come to life and become our nightmarish reality.

In wartimes, a lockdown, as much an inconvenience as it may seem, helped serve a higher purpose. When at war, a lockdown was a way to protect your citizens from air bombings, artillery firing and missiles, it was a way to survive. It would mean that you would be told to stay at home, not be allowed to venture out and you would most definitely be disconnected from simple comforts that you would have grown accustomed.  A wartime lockdown also helped in rallying people from all walks of life, injecting them with a high dose of patriotism and sending them off to the battlefield, with a smile on their face. This current war is also very similar, we are rallying together for humankind’s collective fight against our new and unseen common enemy, the C-19 virus.

Lets start at the very beginning. Pandemics of this scale happen only once in a lifetime or once in almost every 100 years. It is no doubt an unsettling fact that there is no living person today who can in person,  first hand, share his or her past experience and expertise with a pandemic of this magnitude. We can only rely on news archives, historical data records, anecdotes and a multiude of sophisticated pandemic scenario planning done by research centers. And we can only rely on information shared by early responders, that not only changes every day in confusing ways, but is also served heavily sprinkled with fake news and misinformation. 

What we know so far about this pandemic is very little, it's essentially sketchy information pieced together here and there with facts and fiction. And, the scary part is that it has never been more important to know what we have to do, to stay alive and survive as an individual and as a species.

The lockdowns have affected different people differently. The extroverts have never before felt so caged up in their homes, however large or small their houses may be, because to be up and about is in the very nature of their existence. They crave for human interaction and desperately need to get away from the daily routines. The extroverts see the lockdown the same as house arrest, perhaps even imprisonment. For the extrovert, each passing day is extreme agony, re-lived again and again. Lockdowns just don't work for them because it is a path towards poor mental and physical health.

The introverts on the other hand, could care less. They welcome the opportunity to stay home and go about their already normal lives, barring the odd inconvenience of having to step out to get your grocery necessities. One of my good friends even said that he never realized that he is finally living his dream life, which is to be able to roll out of bed into an office chair and then walk five steps into the rest of the house and then jump back in bed he was done with work. He now is able to live this dream feeling a great sense of gratification and self-achievement, and guess what, he has the permission from his boss. I always thought I was a self confessed extrovert but i feel this way too.

As much as there are physical, psychological and emotional dimensions in adjusting to a near-imprisoned life, we need to apply some common-sensical logic to understand the anatomy of a lockdown, why it is important and how it helps us to make sense of what is the safe path back to a kind of near-normalcy. Dieter F. Uchtdorf, a German aviator, airline executive and religious leader, once said “It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop.” So, this is our opportunity to shape our own responses and come out stronger.

Here are some interesting thoughts that I put together, an attempt at piecing together logical reasoning and opinions that I gathered from talking to folks I know and reading expert insights on digital media channels. These are my views, so, please feel free to debate, challenge, endorse and add your views in the comments section at the very end of this blog.

Lockdowns Help Generate Data and Benchmarks

No nation or government in the beginning of a crisis knows exactly how an unknown virus pandemic will play out in their nation. It has surprisingly shown a varied range of effects on different countries, which means there seem to be several factors at play here. Some of these are measurable factors, such as ethnicity, weather cycles, vaccination policies, historical exposure to pathogens, immunity building practices of people and even their hygiene habits. Many others factors, unknown or undiscovered for now, will be revealed in the days to come as more research is made available to the public.

I strongly believe that a lockdown is an essential First Step. It allows those tasked with handling the upcoming pandemic to have a starting point for generating measurable data on a daily basis. However faulty, incomplete or unprepared the system may be, a benchmark is a benchmark. From that point onwards, we will be able to stand witness to a captivating unfolding of the pandemic’s narrative, a story that evolves over time, making recorded history as it goes about terrorizing citizens of the  world, regardless of your degrees of separation from its victims.

Data is also essential. Humans have a desperate need to know how to compare themselves, how to evaluate others and who is on the top or bottom of a ranking list. Yes, its this data that helps create a sense of competition, a score keeping if u will, a daily tracking of who is ahead, who is falling behind and who has absolutely no clue what they are up against.

Lockdowns Help Understand Scale

Having a controlled locked-down environment is the first step to understanding patterns and trends of a virus outbreak that has run amok.  With the help of a lockdown, we can know how fast a pandemic can accelerate or decelerate, in response to decisions that are being taken. Knowing the scale and then extrapolating where and how it will impact is the most important input we need for developing an effective battle plan, one that can be continuously measured and tweaked for giving better outcomes.

Every government has by now evolved a system and methodology of testing, tracking and tracing Covid-19 infections that is unique to their situation. However much one may criticize it, this process allows for identifying emerging hotspots and then implementing lockdown measures of selective intensity. Its not perfect, but it's the best they can do for now.

Scale is an often-misunderstood beast. Knowledge of exponentials and mathematics come to mind. Pandemics are known to have exponential scale, and that is often unfathomable to even the most intelligent of human minds. Here is an example that illustrates this point well. It's a known fact that majority of the infected people are asymptomatic, and these people already have antibodies, which means they have already been infected in the past, often without their knowledge. They had become silent transmitters during some period of their infection, and they had at that time been passing every thermometer gun test, as well as having access to frequented areas. This could explain how the virus infection is still on its way to peaking despite intense lockdowns. It would also be logical to assume that most countries have had Covid-19 even before the test kits arrived.

New estimates now say that there is a 40 to 50X factor of infected and asymptomatic patients in every country. This means that if official figures say there are 150.000 confirmed patients, the real number of infected will be 50x or 7.5 million people, and this accounts for a very large number in any given population. Scary, isn’t it?

This single factor of scale, if understood well by people, will explain in a logical way why everyone needs to wear masks, wash hands and keep social distance. The lockdown is the only real way to trigger a slow-down of community transmission and minimize it’s reach to the vulnerable people in society.

Lockdowns Allow for Healthcare Preparedness

Most hospitals and healthcare professionals in the beginning of a pandemic have no clue what they are dealing with.  They have no idea how to treat patients except from information passed on by countries that have been hit earlier. They mostly have to learn everything from scratch. They don't exactly know what medication or treatment will work and more importantly, what doesn't.  They have no idea how contagious this is to themselves and their patients, what precautions need to be taken and how well their medical facility is prepared to take on the virus’s deadly attack head-on. Only time can give doctors and nurses the relevant work experience that they need. And a lockdown gives them exactly that. Precious time.

Every patient in early days of the pandemic are really like guinea pigs who will be experimented on without choice. Your chances of getting the correct treatment increase significantly over time, compared to patients in the early days. So you definitely want to delay becoming a patient to the very best of your ability, the best scenario being to be able to hold up safely until the day a proven vaccine arrives. Not just hospitals, even you and your families can get better healthcare preparedness due to a lockdown.

Lockdowns Help Educate People En Masse.

Some of us may remember Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a cosmetic surgeon who stated in his 1960 self-help book that it takes 21 days of completing a task for it to become a habit. Subsequently, other university-backed research debated this and stated that it actually takes an average of 66 days, ranging from two months to eight months. Wearing a mask, washing hands, not touching anything, particularly your own face and eyes, not hugging people or shaking hands, all of these requires learning time by humans to become habit-forming practices. Lockdowns are supposed to be giving us that learning time.

Despite lockdowns, we see many people around us disregarding safety practices.  There is a “cry-wolf” effect due to media hype around us. Since most affected people are asymptomatic, only a very small percentage of people get visibly infected, by this I mean those that need to go to hospital or are visibly sick. For many people, they have never seen a covid-19 patient in front of their very own eyes. This seems to be a sickness that other people get and it’s mainly playing out on television, internet news and Whatsapp videos.

While many people get super paranoid with this overdose of information, some get a false sense of security that the virus is out there, there but not here. And this leads to complacency and lack of compliance for safety measures that are needed to be practiced during a lockdown. Many treat these measures half-jokingly and even disregard safety tips. You can see people with half-mast masks, covering the mouth but not the nose, or even hanging it around their neck like a bandana. People still touch and jostle each other and don't think twice about going into crowded places. The average human being is a rebel and risk-taking can even be a thrill to some. Which one are you?

The grim reality of not understanding the true implication of safety measures is that, what may seem as a calculated risk or a frivolous misdemeanor could become your one fatal step that makes you an unwilling part of the daily statistics. It’s really like playing Russian Roulette, the famed game of one bullet in a rotary six-chamber pistol where you can only be saved by luck or chance.

Lockdowns Help Set Expectations

When will life go back to normal? When will the kids go back to school? When can we go back to work and have a normal day and think back of today as an intense vivid nightmare that we woke up to with relief that it was all a bad dream? These are some of the questions on my mind and I know all of you share them.

Going through extended period of lockdown helps set expectations for the reality we have to face if we are to earn a living in order to keep on living. A vast majority (maybe even up to 90%) of the people cannot earn a living while working from home. A lockdown helps us understand this reality better and prepares us for taking the risks that we will need to do when the world opens up to a new normal. We can then prepare for how best to go about our economic activities with maximum safeguards.

A school of thought suggests that a certain profile of people can be sent back to work, those who have recovered from covid-19 and have test results to prove the presence of antibodies, or people who have low risk profile such as the young with no medical pre-conditions. All others are expected to take calculated risks to go to work, armed with a combination of good personal hygiene habits, common sense to do the right thing, and if they are fortunate, go to places that respect government-enforced habitat rules.

Reopening Lockdowns: Is This For Real?

The burning question I have is, how come we went into a lockdown when the numbers were the lowest and how come we are now getting ready to get back, when the numbers are in fact at the highest?  What is the logic here? Is the Government planning to throw bodies at it or is it based on some perverse sacrifice theory?

It feels that every government’s playbook is that “Look Citizens, at first we warned you, then we scared you, after that we educated you, and when you realized that your money is running out, we quickly gave you a plan for re-opening up. So, go back to work, follow the new rules and make sure you don't come to the hospitals that we have prepared for you. Enjoy your New Normal world”

So what exactly are the risks of the New Normal world? As of today, we know that the virus can mostly kill the outliers – the aged, unhealthy and  low immunity population but if they are kept well protected, the remaining can go back to work. We may get sick, but we will recover. And many of us can be treated successfully, since a 2% death rate also means 98% will survive.

With the global economy suffering deeply, layoffs are becoming commonplace. The SME sector that has historically provided jobs to 75% of the workforce, now finds itself on the brink of shutting down.  People need to be able to earn money and continue supporting their families. As a famous author friend of mine remarked, "If the virus doesn't kill us, hunger will". And now, people need to find new things to do, to pivot from their skills of yesterday and learn how to blend into a business of the future.

Cautious re-opening is the only thing we can do, sector-by-sector, place-by-place and store-by-store. It finally helps to have an entire Lockdown-prepared city that is well mapped for identifying emerging hotspots.  Even if there are spikes and selective shutdowns for the next unforeseeable future, the government needs to ensure a majority of the economy can operate smoothly, and this will be at the expense of the minority who may be directly affected by the virus at any given time.

In the end, what will happen will happen. We need resilience to get out of our current predicament. In the words of Elizabeth Edwards, an American attorney, best-selling author and health care activist ,“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.”