PM, Opposition Leader must unite to save lives

On my evening Savannah walks the fast disappearing twilights into dark, breezy cool November evenings we associate with parang floating through the trees are pierced by sirens. Ambulances. And instead of discussing Christmas curtains and limes, walkers turn to one another on edge and discuss COVID-19. Mostly the deaths and how they shattered our lives. We mutter about Wednesday’s 781 cases, shake our heads over Saturday’s 22 deaths. We will get to 2000 deaths by mid-December at this rate.

Now that the vaccine programme has crawled close to a near halt, the virulent fast spreading Delta on the rise, borders open and curfew over, expect cases and deaths to rise exponentially, which will create an unimaginable scenario—probably akin to Italy in April 2020. We have already been warned by the Health Ministry that our health system is buckling under mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients.

Based on the Health Ministry’s numbers, 635,382 of us are partially vaccinated. With 64,402 positive cases of COVID-19, we would expect 700,000 to have some immunity to further infection.

In a population of 1.4 million, that is a 50 per cent partially protected rate. That leaves 700,000 people who can get infected over the coming months. Currently, only 45 per cent of us are fully vaccinated, and herd immunity for the Delta variant requires that at least 90 per cent of us are fully vaccinated or COVID recovered.

Spotting another ambulance within the space of 45 minutes, I thought it served me right. I’ve hated sci-fi with its many effects and no plot. The dystopian films felt too artificial, with only one person left to save the planet while everyone became zombies.

But now instead of watching the films in a cinema, we live in one of those films. Misinformation has zombified people.

The coconut vendor I begged day after day to take the vaccine did so after his sister and two brothers died, unvaccinated.

Now he’s saying, “I didn’t even feel the needle. I walked into the Paddock and every vaccine you want you could get. I got the oneshot J&J.”

He looks amazed. A five-second jab is all it took to keep him alive. He says tearfully, thinking of his siblings no doubt: ‘Those people who died could be alive today if they took it?”

If there is a utopia countering our dystopia I can imagine now, it is this.

We have tried the French approach with safe zones and limited access to restaurants and bars, which worked well for the French but seems to have had a negligible effect here.

Consider the American approach with strong workplace mandates, even in the public sector, the police and the armed forces. It works. The World Economic Forum reported that workers in the US who threatened to quit en masse in response to mandates didn’t materialise. It noted that “resistance to a New York Police Department mandate portended the departure of thousands of officers, but just 89 officers or 0.3 per cent of the force left.

Now consider Austria’s approach—a limited lockdown has been put in place. Only nonvaccinated people are fully locked down, with the vaccinated operating as usual.

Between these two approaches, we can take our numbers up to 90 per cent to save lives and our economy. Vaccine mandates, especially in the public service, may be difficult for politicians of both parties to support because the vaccine-hesitant make up big chunks of both parties’ supporters. But if ever there was a time to do the right thing it is now. The Austrian Chancellor justified mandates by saying he was fulfilling his “responsibility”, he said, to “protect the people of Austria”.

The Prime Minister and Opposition Leader need to unite to mandate vaccinations to protect T&T. It’s the only solution to the pandemic. This plague killing our people is equal to a country at war.

Now is not the time to play to the gallery for votes, or oppose for the sake of opposing, or be a selfish citizen saying, ‘It’s a personal choice.’ When your ‘personal choice’ can kill people, it is the wrong one. If Government and opposition care about people, they must not allow the vaccine-hesitant to hold a small country like ours, already under pressure from crime, falling oil prices, and rising poverty, to turn into a full-on dystopian reality.