Careful first steps to recovery
Over two and a half months into Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 epidemic, the number of positive infection detections stood at 269 as at yesterday evening, as the nation began to read and absorb the detailed guidelines issued by the President’s Office for the gradual return to normal life. Even as people still live in trepidation over the viral threat, the new governmental guidelines as well as plans for recovery emerging from the private sector, are important stepping stones for the nation to re-build the moderate prosperity it had achieved in recent decades.
While some of the most developed nations are still reeling from the brutal impact of a downplayed pandemic, this country is now poised to enter the recovery stage. Unlike some of the biggest and richest nations, there were no histrionics here: no braggadocio dismissing the health threat, no pretences till daily fatalities reached the hundreds, no political arguments over strategy, no accusing fingers pointed at other countries.
In this country, political and business leaderships, medical technocracy, public administration, the military establishment, all co-ordinated in a spirit of collective responsibility.
Most importantly, in stark contrast to the affluent societies, the public here generally displayed a similar sense of national community in readily complying with the rigid social and livelihood restrictions with little grumbling. Initially, people took time to fully understand the meaning and method of the required new hygienic social practices. But once learned and, egged on by the slow mounting of infection numbers, the public was soon complying with the rules despite the inconvenience and, on occasion, despite administrative failures to cushion the shortages of service and supplies.
Certainly the country’s institutions have displayed their calibre in their on-going success in dealing with this huge threat to our physical and mental health as well as to our hard-won prosperity as an upper-middle-income country.
Now it is the challenge of defending and re-building that prosperity that we must all take up.
The new recovery ‘start-up’ guidelines issued by the President’s Office are most detailed and meticulous. They both enable a careful revival of industrial life and services as well as ensure the continued social-medical discipline in surviving the on-going epidemic – that is, if properly observed.
The business community is certainly alert to the sheer complexity of the challenge for economic revival, judging by the series of detailed proposals made by the combined business leaderships at the same time as the governmental guidelines were announced.
From this week, there is to be phased relaxing of curfew regimes more or less in consonance with the existing demography of the epidemic’s impact. That is, the epidemic hotspots will initially remain under strict lockdown while all the districts with little disease impact are to be gradually opened up for business, trade, and industry. But, not so much for social life.
People are called to carefully begin their livelihoods – which are the most important thing, after all. Socialising, leisure, entertainment, are not the priority, the President’s guidelines clearly imply. Everyone will agree that this order of priority is most reasonable in terms of physically surviving the COVID threat and, most responsible in terms of ensuring that our collective livelihood efforts are not hindered by the disease.
After all, the coming together of people for economic activity is itself a health risk given that the virus is still in transmission although the spread is being contained. Therefore, we will all agree that there no immediate need to add to that transmission risk by additionally congregating for leisure pursuits outside the home. That is why the ‘stay home’ rule is still a ‘must’ at night for the whole nation and will be enforced. Thus, even as different parts of the country begin economic life in the coming weeks, there will still be curfew in the evenings.
Now it is the challenge of defending and re-building that prosperity that we must all take up.
The new recovery ‘start-up’ guidelines issued by the President’s Office are most detailed and meticulous. They both enable a careful revival of industrial life and services as well as ensure the continued social-medical discipline in surviving the on-going epidemic – that is, if properly observed.
The business community is certainly alert to the sheer complexity of the challenge for economic revival, judging by the series of detailed proposals made by the combined business leaderships at the same time as the governmental guidelines were announced.
From this week, there is to be phased relaxing of curfew regimes more or less in consonance with the existing demography of the epidemic’s impact. That is, the epidemic hotspots will initially remain under strict lockdown while all the districts with little disease impact are to be gradually opened up for business, trade, and industry. But, not so much for social life.
People are called to carefully begin their livelihoods – which are the most important thing, after all. Socialising, leisure, entertainment, are not the priority, the President’s guidelines clearly imply. Everyone will agree that this order of priority is most reasonable in terms of physically surviving the COVID threat and, most responsible in terms of ensuring that our collective livelihood efforts are not hindered by the disease.
After all, the coming together of people for economic activity is itself a health risk given that the virus is still in transmission although the spread is being contained. Therefore, we will all agree that there no immediate need to add to that transmission risk by additionally congregating for leisure pursuits outside the home. That is why the ‘stay home’ rule is still a ‘must’ at night for the whole nation and will be enforced. Thus, even as different parts of the country begin economic life in the coming weeks, there will still be curfew in the evenings.
Now it is the challenge of defending and re-building that prosperity that we must all take up.
The new recovery ‘start-up’ guidelines issued by the President’s Office are most detailed and meticulous. They both enable a careful revival of industrial life and services as well as ensure the continued social-medical discipline in surviving the on-going epidemic – that is, if properly observed.
The business community is certainly alert to the sheer complexity of the challenge for economic revival, judging by the series of detailed proposals made by the combined business leaderships at the same time as the governmental guidelines were announced.
From this week, there is to be phased relaxing of curfew regimes more or less in consonance with the existing demography of the epidemic’s impact. That is, the epidemic hotspots will initially remain under strict lockdown while all the districts with little disease impact are to be gradually opened up for business, trade, and industry. But, not so much for social life.
People are called to carefully begin their livelihoods – which are the most important thing, after all. Socialising, leisure, entertainment, are not the priority, the President’s guidelines clearly imply. Everyone will agree that this order of priority is most reasonable in terms of physically surviving the COVID threat and, most responsible in terms of ensuring that our collective livelihood efforts are not hindered by the disease.
After all, the coming together of people for economic activity is itself a health risk given that the virus is still in transmission although the spread is being contained. Therefore, we will all agree that there no immediate need to add to that transmission risk by additionally congregating for leisure pursuits outside the home. That is why the ‘stay home’ rule is still a ‘must’ at night for the whole nation and will be enforced. Thus, even as different parts of the country begin economic life in the coming weeks, there will still be curfew in the evenings.
The medical authorities will naturally assess the risks after some weeks of monitoring for any additional transmission of the disease due to public movements and congregation arising from revived economic life. As soon as they see economic life proceeding apace without lending itself to an enhanced viral transmission, the health authorities will begin further relaxing of the social distancing strictures.
But that is still weeks away and no one who wants our economic revival to succeed will grumble at delays in the return to our social leisure.
Meanwhile, the phased economic revival is girded with complex programming of public commuting – staff cohorts at work places will be limited and rostered to ensure that the number of commuters at any given time is reduced by at least half, initially. This aims at reducing public congestion during travel and also inside work places, all for the purpose of containing disease transmission.
All this is very new, not only to our society, but to the whole global community as it fights a pandemic that is the product of urban modernity and globalisation. All these attempts to manage mass movements of populations, even as such movements must be allowed for economic survival, cannot be perfect in implementation and, public perseverance and discipline must win the day.
Over two and a half months into Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 epidemic, the number of positive infection detections stood at 269 as at yesterday evening, as the nation began to read and absorb the detailed guidelines issued by the President’s Office for the gradual return to normal life. Even as people still live in trepidation over the viral threat, the new governmental guidelines as well as plans for recovery emerging from the private sector, are important stepping stones for the nation to re-build the moderate prosperity it had achieved in recent decades.
While some of the most developed nations are still reeling from the brutal impact of a downplayed pandemic, this country is now poised to enter the recovery stage. Unlike some of the biggest and richest nations, there were no histrionics here: no braggadocio dismissing the health threat, no pretences till daily fatalities reached the hundreds, no political arguments over strategy, no accusing fingers pointed at other countries.
In this country, political and business leaderships, medical technocracy, public administration, the military establishment, all co-ordinated in a spirit of collective responsibility.
Most importantly, in stark contrast to the affluent societies, the public here generally displayed a similar sense of national community in readily complying with the rigid social and livelihood restrictions with little grumbling. Initially, people took time to fully understand the meaning and method of the required new hygienic social practices. But once learned and, egged on by the slow mounting of infection numbers, the public was soon complying with the rules despite the inconvenience and, on occasion, despite administrative failures to cushion the shortages of service and supplies.
Certainly the country’s institutions have displayed their calibre in their on-going success in dealing with this huge threat to our physical and mental health as well as to our hard-won prosperity as an upper-middle-income country.
Now it is the challenge of defending and re-building that prosperity that we must all take up.
The new recovery ‘start-up’ guidelines issued by the President’s Office are most detailed and meticulous. They both enable a careful revival of industrial life and services as well as ensure the continued social-medical discipline in surviving the on-going epidemic – that is, if properly observed.
The business community is certainly alert to the sheer complexity of the challenge for economic revival, judging by the series of detailed proposals made by the combined business leaderships at the same time as the governmental guidelines were announced.
From this week, there is to be phased relaxing of curfew regimes more or less in consonance with the existing demography of the epidemic’s impact. That is, the epidemic hotspots will initially remain under strict lockdown while all the districts with little disease impact are to be gradually opened up for business, trade, and industry. But, not so much for social life.
People are called to carefully begin their livelihoods – which are the most important thing, after all. Socialising, leisure, entertainment, are not the priority, the President’s guidelines clearly imply. Everyone will agree that this order of priority is most reasonable in terms of physically surviving the COVID threat and, most responsible in terms of ensuring that our collective livelihood efforts are not hindered by the disease.
After all, the coming together of people for economic activity is itself a health risk given that the virus is still in transmission although the spread is being contained. Therefore, we will all agree that there no immediate need to add to that transmission risk by additionally congregating for leisure pursuits outside the home. That is why the ‘stay home’ rule is still a ‘must’ at night for the whole nation and will be enforced. Thus, even as different parts of the country begin economic life in the coming weeks, there will still be curfew in the evenings.
Now it is the challenge of defending and re-building that prosperity that we must all take up.
The new recovery ‘start-up’ guidelines issued by the President’s Office are most detailed and meticulous. They both enable a careful revival of industrial life and services as well as ensure the continued social-medical discipline in surviving the on-going epidemic – that is, if properly observed.
The business community is certainly alert to the sheer complexity of the challenge for economic revival, judging by the series of detailed proposals made by the combined business leaderships at the same time as the governmental guidelines were announced.
From this week, there is to be phased relaxing of curfew regimes more or less in consonance with the existing demography of the epidemic’s impact. That is, the epidemic hotspots will initially remain under strict lockdown while all the districts with little disease impact are to be gradually opened up for business, trade, and industry. But, not so much for social life.
People are called to carefully begin their livelihoods – which are the most important thing, after all. Socialising, leisure, entertainment, are not the priority, the President’s guidelines clearly imply. Everyone will agree that this order of priority is most reasonable in terms of physically surviving the COVID threat and, most responsible in terms of ensuring that our collective livelihood efforts are not hindered by the disease.
After all, the coming together of people for economic activity is itself a health risk given that the virus is still in transmission although the spread is being contained. Therefore, we will all agree that there no immediate need to add to that transmission risk by additionally congregating for leisure pursuits outside the home. That is why the ‘stay home’ rule is still a ‘must’ at night for the whole nation and will be enforced. Thus, even as different parts of the country begin economic life in the coming weeks, there will still be curfew in the evenings.
Now it is the challenge of defending and re-building that prosperity that we must all take up.
The new recovery ‘start-up’ guidelines issued by the President’s Office are most detailed and meticulous. They both enable a careful revival of industrial life and services as well as ensure the continued social-medical discipline in surviving the on-going epidemic – that is, if properly observed.
The business community is certainly alert to the sheer complexity of the challenge for economic revival, judging by the series of detailed proposals made by the combined business leaderships at the same time as the governmental guidelines were announced.
From this week, there is to be phased relaxing of curfew regimes more or less in consonance with the existing demography of the epidemic’s impact. That is, the epidemic hotspots will initially remain under strict lockdown while all the districts with little disease impact are to be gradually opened up for business, trade, and industry. But, not so much for social life.
People are called to carefully begin their livelihoods – which are the most important thing, after all. Socialising, leisure, entertainment, are not the priority, the President’s guidelines clearly imply. Everyone will agree that this order of priority is most reasonable in terms of physically surviving the COVID threat and, most responsible in terms of ensuring that our collective livelihood efforts are not hindered by the disease.
After all, the coming together of people for economic activity is itself a health risk given that the virus is still in transmission although the spread is being contained. Therefore, we will all agree that there no immediate need to add to that transmission risk by additionally congregating for leisure pursuits outside the home. That is why the ‘stay home’ rule is still a ‘must’ at night for the whole nation and will be enforced. Thus, even as different parts of the country begin economic life in the coming weeks, there will still be curfew in the evenings.
The medical authorities will naturally assess the risks after some weeks of monitoring for any additional transmission of the disease due to public movements and congregation arising from revived economic life. As soon as they see economic life proceeding apace without lending itself to an enhanced viral transmission, the health authorities will begin further relaxing of the social distancing strictures.
But that is still weeks away and no one who wants our economic revival to succeed will grumble at delays in the return to our social leisure.
Meanwhile, the phased economic revival is girded with complex programming of public commuting – staff cohorts at work places will be limited and rostered to ensure that the number of commuters at any given time is reduced by at least half, initially. This aims at reducing public congestion during travel and also inside work places, all for the purpose of containing disease transmission.
All this is very new, not only to our society, but to the whole global community as it fights a pandemic that is the product of urban modernity and globalisation. All these attempts to manage mass movements of populations, even as such movements must be allowed for economic survival, cannot be perfect in implementation and, public perseverance and discipline must win the day.
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