“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”~WHO
As governments were figuring out how to respond to the COVID-19 virus at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) offered some recommendations. Among other things, the WHO recommended ensuring that lockdown policies were in place until the virus was under control. In April, when WHO set out new guidance for ending lockdowns, it asserted that for most countries it was too soon to go back to normal.
Just recently, however, WHO has changed course, citing all the harmful effects of locking down. In an interview that Dr. David Nabarro, a WHO COVID-19 envoy, had with The Spectator, he pointed out the disproportionate effect that the lockdowns have had on the poor.
“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.
Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it.
This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe, actually. And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it, work together and learn from each other, but remember—lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”
Minnesota should fully open up
I have written quite extensively on how harmful the lockdown policies have been and continue to be. In Minnesota, for instance, restaurants are on the verge of collapse, crushed by stringent lockdown policies. Currently, as restaurants are about to face the woes of winter, which means they cannot do patio dining, they still have capacity limits that require them to serve fewer people than they normally would.
Albeit a little late, it is a step in the right direction that more organizations, like the WHO, are coming out against the punishing lockdown policies, which have been devastating to small businesses as well as low-income individuals.
Minnesota lawmakers should take note and reverse course. Continuing lockdown policies will only further damage people’s livelihoods potentially without doing much to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.