Coronavirus infections in the country have spiked from crawling weekly twos and threes in its first weeks in March, to galloping 10s, 20s, 50s and even hundreds within days lately. In 24 hours last week, the number jumped by over 200 new cases! Which is why we are surprised that the Government is still flirting with half measures and hesitating to resort to a complete (nationwide) or partial (Yaounde, Douala, Bafoussam, Buea and Limbe) lockdown.
At over 500 infections at the weekend only a month since the first case was reported, there is no guessing how high the curve will rise this week and the next as we go forward. The immediate and long-term future is uncertain. Things will probably only get pretty worse before they can get any better. We cannot tell at what depth of the abyss we will bounce before our own recovery begins. We are still on the downward slide. It is time to go the whole hug and take the bull by the horns.
The half measures imposed so far – the 13 measures of mid-March – have only triggered scant behaviour change. It is true that hand-washing, use of hand sanitizers, wearing facemasks, social distancing, time limits for snack-bars and other pubs and limited movement have become a part of the lives of a fraction of city-dwellers. That should be a very small fraction because multitudes are still seen going about without facemasks even in the most risky situations. Many city-dwellers still mingle like in times of normalcy. As if the virus is not transmitted in the day time, adult delinquents still gather at bars and down-market liquor joints (matango bars) and shouting and spraying saliva into each other’s faces and cups. Taxi drivers in cities have admirably complied with the three-passenger rule yet, hardly any of them wears a facemask. Nor does door-to-door measure the prescribed minimum one metre social distance between passengers.
Schools have shut down ostensibly to protect children from the dangers, especially because of the maximum 500 per gathering but kids now home are sent out by desperate parents to sell around town without facemasks and with the least notion of the danger that looms and which of the hygiene and safety measures they must observe. Even administrative officers in the hinterlands address crowds of denizens to advise them about the dangers of coronavirus, yet create avenues for potential contamination, as the population crowd around them, shoulder to shoulder, speaking into each other’s faces without observing the prescribed social distance.
Whatever chain breaking may have been gained during the week among the few adhering to the rules, continued weekend bad habits or negligence may negate them all when people congregate in numbers to jog and stretch together. Far from social distancing, there is social mingling in ways that were any within the premises infected, the virus could easily spread.
The shortcomings and dangers are legion. The 13 half-measures have not kept us safe. A lockdown is what makes sense to do without further delay. After all, delay will not remedy the situation; it will only leave the door open for a remediable situation to meltdown to disaster before we inescapably come to adopt late-in-the-day remedies. A stitch in time saves.
We make this call not oblivious of the dire strain a lockdown would be on our poor and struggling population. We agree that cut-and-paste or copy work of lockdown measures taken by other countries is not the way to go. We commend the hesitance of Benin to do just what others are doing. We salute the wisdom of President Patrice Talon that a total lockdown would punish his people since his country lacks the means to provide socio-economic palliatives.
But cut-and-paste would only hurt if done without accompanying socio-economic compensation measures. The Government and its friends should roll out accompanying socio-economic measures to cushion the effects of a lockdown. In the Government’s stimulus package from its solidarity fund, it should impose price reductions for goods and services and promise tax reductions to businesses, the price of fuel should be reduced, private schools should be offered crisis subventions to enable them pay teachers now out of work. The list is long.
The best way to contain coronavirus is to break the chain of its spread and this can best be done by a complete lockdown of the country or a sectional that circumscribes the regions most hit by the virus, that is, Centre, Littoral and West. That way, with vigorous and rigorous testing and quarantine of suspected cases within two weeks (the incubation period of the virus) the true face of the virus will be exposed and managed.