Countries around the world were bamboozled and pressured into adopting catastrophically self-destructive lockdown policies over inflated fears of the Covid-19 pandemic; policies that were not scientifically supported, were without historical precedent, and which were dramatically disproportionate to what the data and research now reveals were the actual risks posed by the virus.
Now, these countries are facing an incomprehensibly enormous amount of self-inflicted socio-economic damage. Tens of millions of jobs lost, millions of businesses closed, whole sectors of the economy sabotaged and crippled, state budgets depleted and revenues lost.
The leading international entities of power are now trying to tell these countries the rules of how they should try to recover. The UN, WHO, IMF, World Bank, etc, are pushing their guidelines for a “green recovery”, and how both the public and private sectors should re-organise how they operate; basically requiring continued caution and restrictions and so forth. In other words, slowing, hindering, and complicating the ability of nations to return to normalcy and freedom.
It is going to be hard to face, but governments (particularly in the developing world) need to come to terms with the fact that they have been had. They subverted their economies for no good reason, and they need to reject the demands for a “new normal” and instead re-open immediately without restrictions.
Every single person who lost their job should be restored to their workplace, and every business that was forced into permanent closure should be re-opened with the support of their governments — not loans but grants. Every day of lockdown has cost billions of dollars in losses, yes, and financing SMEs and larger companies to resume normal operations will cost billions more — but those billions are not losses, they are investments in the recovery of your nation’s economy.
Travel restrictions should be lifted without exception and trade and tourism resumed without the handicap of mandatory screenings and quarantines. This game has to end, and the countries that end it fastest will be the winners, and the countries that recover soonest.