The pandemic bottom line

Now that COVID-19 has begun to fade into the background – though it has not completely disappeared - we should not let too much time pass before convening an honest retrospective on the country’s pandemic response.

This should be designed to capture everything from the quality of official interventions to civil, political, scientific, communication, and other areas of national performance.

Of course, there will always be difficulties associated with the mediation of such a discourse, particularly since virtually all quarters of recognised authority are known to have fallen short – however hard we all tried. The judiciary, I believe, remained intact and independent.

The fact is nobody really saw this coming in the way it eventually did. And, in the process, every strength and every weakness of a country still in the transition to full maturity lay exposed for all to see.

That said, show me a country, small or large, that matched the challenge through public policy and private action to the extent that the pandemic turned out to be, as some impostors here continue to suggest - much ado about a relatively minor matter.

The purpose of a full review in T&T would be to examine both the brittle and the strong points of the institutions - formal and informal – that acted on our behalf, however marginal or integral their actual roles.

In the process, we are likely to discover as much beauty as the utterly repulsive. Some of the latter has been chronicled right here on this page and expressed as privilege, political opportunism, charlatanism, and a most cynical cleavage to myth and untruth.

Such public observations therefore disqualify me from a mediating role since there is no possibility of a “middle ground” when close to 4,400 have died.

From the very beginning when COVID-denial (“it’s just a bad flu”) barged onto the public stage, to claims that pandemic measures here comprised a uniquely disproportionate reaction (“the rest of the Americas remains open for business”), to an assertion of ethnic favouritism, open promotion of vaccine-hesitancy, to the suggestion that many who died would have died anyway. There is much to consider along the way.

These are not pleasant memories. They all pointed to a willingness by some, led by opinion-leaders acting from the standpoint of personal privilege, to have the country sacrifice what they considered to be lesser lives and livelihoods.

Today, even as the significant dent sustained on the economy is being addressed (as is the case almost everywhere), there is a narrative which purports failure while hopefully envisaging consequential partisan fortune. This is matched and outdone only by the parading of statistics on violent crime as a function of political boastfulness.

It has to be that we are afflicted with some kind of illness deeply embedded in our collective psyche that’s destined to be far more fatal than the virus which overran the globe.

Last week, a few of us were remembering covert food-sharing escapades, mask-wearing habits, “essential” workers and the media, vaccination certificates, pandemic elections (there were several throughout the Caribbean), quarantine detentions, border closures, the press conferences, wild parties ignored by the police, “private” beaches, painful nasal swabs, who visited previously unexplored territory for the vaccine, COVID-deniers who fell ill, and most sadly we remembered those who died.

At least informally, we have been conducting our own individual and communal reviews. But it would be worthwhile for us as a country to conduct a clinical examination of all that went right and the several areas in which we fell down on the job.

It could be that the university folks are already having a rigorous look – as is their duty. Some of their professionals played particularly important roles in drawing attention to mental health perils and the science behind the vaccines. Others, not that much.

The Media Institute of the Caribbean, with which I am aligned, initiated several introspective journalistic reviews of what was happening on the public communication front regionally. The Association of Caribbean Media Workers frequently brought regional journalists together to catch up on the challenges and published ‘Through the Pandemic – State of the Caribbean Media Report 2022.’

Seems as if the sector in which I work (reviled and mocked as it is) admirably saw a role for itself in leading an open and honest discussion on what went wrong, and what went right.

In the process, we unearthed numerous areas of fault and fragility, and points of real strength and resilience. The rest of society needs to know how we really made it to this point.