In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead ruminates over something I’ve touched on now and again since January—the plight of the poor countries of the world, most in the “Global South”. Maybe SARS-CoV-2 will be less contagious there due to their climates or may it won’t be as virulent. Dr. Mead remarks on the “lockdown” strategy:
Take the “lockdown†strategy. The purpose of this extremely costly policy is to “flatten the curve,†by shutting down much of the economy to ensure that health systems aren’t overwhelmed by waves of desperately ill patients.
In much of the world, this strategy is impossible. Only rich countries and rich peoples can afford lockdowns. In much of the Global South a substantial percentage of the population lives from hand to mouth. Many people make money selling things on the street or in crowded informal markets. They draw their water from communal taps; they use community latrines, if they have sanitation at all. Hundreds of millions do not have reliable access to clean water, much less to soap or hand sanitizer. After a few days without work, hunger will drive people back out onto the streets.
Even if lockdowns could be sustained, they would do little good. There are five ventilators in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one for about 20 million people. Ten African countries have no ventilators at all. Even if the disease’s spread could be slowed, medical capacity in the Global South is so lacking that there’s no chance it could be built up in time to help. The most stringent lockdown could not prevent a massive public-health crisis in many countries, and no such lockdown can endure.
He goes on to touch on some of the tactics that have been bandied about for helping them, e.g. foreign aid, gifts of medical and protective equipment, and so on. Those are more likely to help rich people in poor countries than they are the poor themselves.
There are basically two things that we can do to help the poor people of the world and those are to end our own agricultural subsidies which confer competitive advantages on our farmers compared with theirs and to reopen the U. S. economy with all due speed. The American consumer who is a prisoner in his own house and whose stores are all closed cannot pull the world economy out of the ditch into which it is heading.
