Fight against the coronavirus is embroiled in a ‘fog of war’, with the poor becoming collateral damage

The divergences in testing targets, reliability and reporting across countries mean the data is often misleading
Meanwhile, the poor suffer disproportionately during lockdowns and their living conditions make them vulnerable to the disease

Philip Bowring

Published: 9:00am, 19 Apr 2020

Why you can trust SCMP

“War is too important to be left to the generals,” remarked a prime minister concerned about keeping field commanders from seeking small victories at massive cost. Likewise, leaders today must listen to and question not only the virologists and epidemiologists, but also the economists, unions and employer groups, social workers and ordinary people who have their own risk/reward calculations. Only then can they make decisions on behalf of the societies they govern.

The expert views are sometimes contradictory, and constantly changing as new facts emerge. Much weight is placed on data, which is often unreliable. Differences from country to country are so extreme that they cannot be measuring the same thing to the same extent.

“The fog of war” applies to the Covid-19 pandemic as much as to any military conflict.

Many are suggesting the world will have to wait for a vaccine or effective antiviral medicine before life can begin to return to the old normal. This shows touching faith in finding the “silver bullet”, a faith daily enhanced by announcements of drug trials.

But what if it takes six years, not six months? Even a breakthrough drug cannot quickly be made available to enough of the 7.6 billion population to break the cycle of infection. Nor can half those people go into lockdown without famines and the breakdown of systems which enable societies – including distribution of medicines – to function.

Covid-19 data is uncertain and often misleading. Testing per million population (as of April 17) ranges from 59 in Myanmar, 220 in India and 2,694 in Malaysia to 15,509 in Hong Kong, 20,629 in Germany and 111,955 in Iceland. Some places, mainland China included, do not provide overall testing data. Other places have tested so few that it gives only minimal information about the spread. Moreover, data may be massaged or concealed for political reasons.

Testing targets range from random to only the most severe and hospitalised cases. Test reliability is a huge known unknown, as is the incidence of asymptomatic cases.

A medical workers wearing protective clothing takes samples from a visitor at a coronavirus testing booth outside Incheon international airport, west of Seoul, on April 1. While South Korea has adopted an aggressive approaching to testing, other countries have not done so. Photo: AFP

There is also a huge range in death rates. Some countries only count those hospitalised with Covid-19, others include people – mostly the old with existing conditions – as Covid-19 cases if they die with it rather than from it. In some European countries, deaths in care homes for the aged have only been recorded late or maybe not at all.

In Asia, it is a reasonable fear that such cases have also been missed. Hong Kong has recorded just four Covid-19 deaths in a period when total deaths in a 10-week period would be close to 10,000.

Elsewhere, lockdowns in crowded cities, like Jakarta and Mumbai, may well cause huge social disruption without being effective, and causing social and economic dislocation which mostly hits the poorest. Minimal testing means it is difficult to track lockdown effectiveness.

Poorer groups generally suffer more. That is even the case in rich, self-regarding Singapore. Its much-vaunted public housing programme exclude the non-resident 29 per cent of the population and 37 per cent of the workforce, who are mostly either domestic helpers or workers living in barrack block dormitories with bunk beds and multi-user toilet facilities. Unsurprisingly, they have become the centre of Covid-19 outbreaks.

Foreign media, always anxious to preserve their access in Singapore, have long turned a blind eye to workers’ conditions. But now at least a few respected Singaporeans, such as former top envoy Tommy Koh, are waking up to this issue.

Coronavirus: how surge in cases puts Singapore’s 4G leaders in a spot

Hong Kong has fewer such workers, but, still, the racism inherent in systems focused on recruiting brown-skinned Asians and depriving them of normal worker rights is obvious. So let us hear no more self-pitying stories in the Hong Kong media about coronavirus-inspired racism against “Asians” (the usage of the term seems to exclude Indians) while mostly ignoring what goes on here – recently exacerbated by the attempt to dissuade helpers from not staying locked into life on the kitchen floor.

Hong Kong’s domestic helpers urge recognition of role in Covid-19 war

If there is a silver lining to the pandemic for Hong Kong, it could be that the government will be forced to realise the unsound base of its property-dependent tax policy, and its capital spending. One little noticed statistic in the recent budget is that the latter is projected to increase from HK$83 billion in 2019-20 to HK$152 billion in 2022-23. Unless land revenues keep pace, this surge in concrete-pouring will have to be paid for by debt or cutting health and social spending on an ageing population.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong lags far behind modern cities in investment in a clean environment and allowing new technologies to break down politically protected oligopolies. Can this bureaucracy turn its back on concrete, on the demands of vested interests and political pressures, and refashion its taxes and spending? Just maybe, the Covid-19 hit to its finances will shake the system to its core.

Philip Bowring is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator

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