The present corona virus crisis gives us lots to think about. Lessons will be learned when it is all over. But right now, why is there no discussion of the “lockdown” policy now used by most countries, including the ones I know best, the US and the UK?
What happens when we ask people to give up their ordinary lives? And is this really the best approach? In hindsight we may know the answer, but shouldn’t we be asking right now if this is really the way we want to go?
Different countries show us alternatives. Ordinary life is still going on in the streets of Singapore; the only people quarantined are those who test positive for the virus. The Netherlands keeps life’s sociology going by letting this virus run its course just as the seasonal flu does. Here are two countries that preserve the precious relationships that wrap around private life and make possible modern society.
So why have so many countries sacrificed social activities in the name of health? And why has questioning of this policy been unreported? Lockdown means putting everybody’s needs beneath those of hospitals. This is a truly weird reversal. The usual purpose of health care is to put people first and ask health care providers to help the sick. Lockdown reverses this logic. It asks all people, healthy and potentially sick alike, to give up their normal lives and rescue hospitals from an embarrassing flood of patients, who in reality need only minimal care.
How did the medical professionals around hospitals, win the policy battle? The university medical reports that turned Prime Minister Johnson around give us a clue. The medical profession’s own sense of prestige, I suggest, is opposed to turning the pinnacle of scientific medicine, the hospital, into what is essentially a medieval fever house. Waiting for patients’ fevers to pass, with a little oxygen to help breathing, adds nothing to a hospital in terms of science, research, grants, publications, professional prestige, and its reputation with the public. It seems to me that the corona virus threatens the hospitals with a return to medieval medicine – before there was science, pharmaceuticals, and technology.
Did America, the UK, and other countries throw their sociological lives into lockdown for this reason? And has the cost of suppressing every single person actually been measured? Let’s look at what is being destroyed here. Stripped away from everybody are their birthdays, weddings, funerals, entertainments, travel, education, examinations, admission to careers, working lives, businesses, the national economy and world trade. From this list of ill effects, those that are economic may be recognized first. But underlying these, and carrying their own hazards and losses, are what we should understand as the living web of sociology – people’s careers, creativity, physical and mental health, life plans, intimate relationships, and happiness in the long term. In a weird reversal, our nations prioritized the prestige of high tech medicine over the needs of ordinary people. And, in the end, will this lockdown prove to have been really necessary? Let’s hope that critical thinkers will look back at this moment in history and find ways for future societies to value their collective sociology.