We are well over seven months into a work from home setup across multiple countries across the world. During the same time, predictably, economies have cratered and have since started a slow, careful march back to some form of normalcy.
Given that the pandemic has impacted economies with such uniformity, and across the globe, I imagined that any measurements and metrics that have to do with inter/national economies and markets would start taking the toll of the pandemic and health care capacities of a population into account.
What I did not expect to happen was that some leaders would choose make healthcare and economic growth as an “either/or” proposition. Consider my mind blown. Even in the pre-pandemic world that we occupied, where apathy and care towards everyday folks was simply absent, I would never have imagined any leader be so very cruel and heartless. When I see such debates unfold in front of my eyes, I have to ask: “Am I nothing more than a ‘slave’ of the economic prosperity machine, just like the slaves who built the pyramids?”
Healthy People make a healthy economy
Markets operate on stability. Why don’t they consider it unstable when a country, state, district, or city is not equipped with enough hospital beds in case an epidemic were to break out?
I do not expect hospitals to maintain a minimum number of beds that correspond to a certain percentage of the net population of the locality that they serve. But I do expect hospitals and governments to plan for, and even engineer emergency makeshift solutions in case such a capacity is desired or becomes necessary. Interestingly, electoral-districts are designed and drawn in the U.S. while taking the net population of a locality into account. Which brings me to my next point.
Why do governments not take public health policy with the same seriousness as they do matters such as elections, military spending, literacy rates or GDP and unemployment rates? I have lived in two major democracies of this world for extended periods of time, and never have I heard public officials make a big deal of the total hospital bed capacity in a given, county, municipality, state or country.
And yet.
Despite the situation that we are in currently, I do not hear public officials reporting how we are doing on hospital capacities. The newspapers report how ICUs and the hospital workers there are being overwhelmed. But nothing as systematic and detailed as the monthly jobs report that suggested that more than 14 million people have filed for unemployment here in the U.S. Markets rise or fall based on monthly jobs reports, why not based on local hospital capacities?
This pandemic presents itself as an opportunity to rethink what we consider to be central to a healthy economy — its people. At the continued risk of being emphatic, if the people participating in an economy are not healthy, then there is no economy.
Public Health — like the Military — is about defending people
Similarly, I have seen how countries spend millions of their respective currencies to prepare for wars that may or may not come. Countries that do not spend on military are eager to sign treaties with friendly countries, with more established militaries, seeking protection from foreign threats. Data from military spending budgets are analyzed by experts of all sorts, who then go on to describe the wisdom in such spending.
At its core, military spending is not done with a profit seeking motive. Sure, wars birth industry. And wars are generally profitable. But that is for the people making money. The rest of us ordinary folk, who do enjoy such coin, still instinctively agree on the necessity of maintaining an army, navy and air force — even though we directly gain nothing from it. There is an implicit public buy-in around the idea of defense and security, no matter the cost.
When we created defense systems to protect ourselves from our geopolitical enemies, how did we forget to create defense systems that will protect us from the age old, formidable, invisible enemy — illness and disease? Why don’t public health budgets not rival their military counterparts? What good does military spending do, when the society that it is meant to protect is crippled with illness and a mountain of death? Why is public health not more of a national security concern?
People make countries and economies. A crippled population makes for a crippled country. Feed, treat, and strengthen the people on the ground who show up everyday to put in their fair share of work. Do all that, and watch the economics roar. Skip those basic steps and watch things founder.
Winter Rant 
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