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Save the population or the economy?
Two strategies against coronavirus

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic: in the press conference of 11 March, the general manager Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was certain that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 will be distributed worldwide. "But governments, companies and individual citizens still have the opportunity to change the trajectory of the epidemic," he concluded.

It is interesting - even for those who have no medical skills like me - to observe how the contrasting strategies adopted to date by governments around the world fall mainly into two categories.


Strategy A is based on a radical contrast of contagion, which provides for the blocking of all activities that are not strictly indispensable and forced social isolation. The guiding principle is that the protection of each citizen's life is a duty on the part of the state and that extreme measures are necessary to defend the entire population, also by sacrificing the economic system and having the certainty of entering a phase of great depression.
Strategy B is diametrically opposite. Contagion is not opposed in any way: production, trade, schools, all activities proceed as if nothing had happened. The sick are also treated knowing that the impending peak of the epidemic will saturate any hospital management skills. Many will die, but the economic damage will be much more modest. In short: business as usual.

Strategy A, adopted for example by China and Italy, has diametrically opposite roots in each of these two countries.


The Chinese cultural tradition is based on the cancellation of the individual in favor of the community. The ideal principle of communism is "from each according to possibility, to each according to necessity"; the result is a collectivist economy where each individual is required to feel part of a community, to trust the state and be ready to scarify himself for the well-being of all. To maintain this collective trust, the government cannot leave the weakest behind and to do so it must call everyone to a great common sacrifice, to accept extreme coercive measures. It must proceed with a strong militarization for the well-being of the state and - therefore - of the community and of each one. In addition, there is a strong cult of ancestors in the Chinese tradition. Respect for the elderly is the very cornerstone of Confucianism, it is not possible to sacrifice them.
On the other hand, Italy has its roots in the value of the Roman family, subsequently integrated into the Catholic values ​​of equality of all the faithful and community cohesion, where murder and indifference are the most serious sins. In this cultural fabric three quarters of a century are added without wars that have exalted the value of life and peace as a universal value. Added to this is a widespread - and ever deeper - mistrust in the governmental capacities of our ever-changing ruling class.

The "old" are no longer seen as custodians of wisdom or as an example for the new generations, but as a burden to keep up with the payment of pensions that we know are much richer than what will be advanced when it is our turn. Despite this, our elders remain a central element of the family: we exploit them as long as we can, we often stay at home until middle age and then download the management of their grandchildren to them and maybe we leave them in a hospice, but taking care to delay with any means the inevitable conclusion of their life.

Strategy B, adopted for example by the United Kingdom and the United States, is based on a calculation without moral scruples: protecting the entire population with draconian measures would have a huge cost for their economy. It is reasoned that no health service would be able, however, to withstand the impact, and that, with an infection that grows exponentially, to focus on a gigantic investment to strengthen hospitals and double the beds in intensive care - in addition to have a devastating economic cost - it would only postpone the inevitable saturation of all available places for a few days.


This strategy, in practice, is equivalent to condemning a slice of its population to death. How wide it will be, will depend on how many ICU beds are available compared to the number of citizens, their average health status, their average age - all easily obtainable statistical data - but also how quickly the virus will spread and how much it will deeply attack each of the affected individuals. No government, even the one that has invested most in its health service, today can estimate the magnitude of the last two factors.
The logic of this choice is based on the fact that Strategy A - the opposite one - has a very high economic cost capable of compromising the national economy for a considerable time, but it also has a much more cynical aspect. Those who will not make it will be the sick and the elderly, two categories of people who do not contribute to the country's gross domestic product but who, on the contrary, are a social load for the healthy and working population. Indemnifying them indirectly to death means decreasing the costs of the national health service and the pension system. But not only that: when the youngest - historically more willing to spend - inherit the wealth of their more thrifty elderly relatives, they will be more likely to make purchases or invest the inheritance received, giving a further boost to the national economy.

Finally, there is a further decisive factor that moves governments to choose Strategy B: at the end of the crisis, the economic system of the nations that have suffered least - or that have cynically benefited from the internal massacre - will be ready to expand to the detriment of nations that will have adopted the humanitarian Strategy A. This will be the right time to buy all that remains at a fair price abroad, buy companies that are bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy and export products and services by penetrating market areas previously dominated from foreign competition.

Is it somewhere in between? Unfortunately, the two strategies that we have called A and B here cannot be expertly mixed hoping to save goat (economy) and cabbage (citizens). Each combination of the two, such as confining at home only some weaker or less useful citizens to society by leaving others at work, laying sanitary cords in limited areas of the country where the virus is more widespread at that time, or allowing citizens to maintaining a social aggregation, albeit partial, are destined for disaster: neither the economy nor the population would be saved.


Even the removal of the problem, the "here is all right" that we heard from the leaders of the United States and North Korea, as well as the simple hesitation in choosing to adopt one of the two Strategies with decision, quickly raise social costs and economic, because with exponential contagion rates, every day of indecision leads to ever-increasing damage that quickly becomes uncontrollable.
Paradoxically, Strategy A, the most humanitarian one, involves exceptional measures, crisis committees called to cut any non-vital activity in the whole country, closing schools, offices, gathering places and stopping everything that is not directly connected. to the minimal survival of the people and healthcare facilities that treat them. This real suspension of personal freedoms must be put into practice with the use of force, if necessary.

Equally paradoxically, implementing Strategy B, the most cynical and proper one of nations that feel at war with the rest of the world, simply means that daily life continues as usual. No urgent measures, no closures, no mobilization of law enforcement agencies, no special laws and no individual confinement. Life continues except for the fact that an increasing number of fellow citizens, especially the elderly and the sick, one day will not show up for work or to take their grandchildren and will crowd the hospitals already overflowing and unable to treat them.

Nobody in the world was prepared for COVID-19, we do not know how to deal with the first major epidemic in the era of globalization, nor do we know the characteristics of this SARS-CoV-2 virus. Nor do we know how to defeat him with a vaccine. We were taken aback and all the governments of the world at the beginning simply ignored or underestimated the problem. Even in China several days passed before the subtle penetration of a virus initially confused as a bad flu was identified as a threat and decisive measures were taken to combat it.

Strategy A in the People's Republic appears to be working. Here citizens have a strong sense of community and have lived together for generations with a strong state and military organization. If the government says you don't leave home and you don't work, you don't leave home. Point. There is no discussion.


Italy has been slower in adopting the same strategy and has implemented it step by step. There was an initial phase in which we tried with sanitary cords and other soft measures. But when we understood that every day the number of infected people and the areas at risk grew out of control, the state was able to give an increasingly structured response by identifying and implementing increasingly decisive and drastic containment measures.
Strategy B, disguised as realism and fatalism, is actually a risky bet to take advantage of the situation to conquer national economic and political hegemony to the detriment of the most respectful nations of their people, or simply more civilians.

Strategy A, on the other hand, bets on the spirit of community, on the trust that citizens place in the state that does not leave them alone, on the more coercive (as in China) or more responsible (as in Italy) understanding and acceptance of individual limitations for well-being common.

We are facing a giant planetary experiment on our skin. Today no one can say which of the two strategies will be successful. If the virus proves to be "little more than a bad flu", and if it passes through the active layers of the population without reaping too many victims, cleansing it Darwinian only of the most socially "useless" individuals, then the nations that have adopted the Strategy B will be ready to conquer the nations that have committed suicide in their economy by adopting Strategy A.


But if the virus proves to be much more lethal than what experts estimate today, if its spread will be much faster, if it will change into more contagious or devious forms, even the best health facilities will collapse and there will be a high number of deaths . Those who have adopted the cynical Strategy B will find themselves the same with the economy on their knees because too high a percentage of their population will have been sacrificed. And above all, those who survive will no longer have confidence in the authority of their government.
Some of the leaders who have adopted Strategy B with determination, today seem to be convinced that they have made a mistake and are trying to slowly retrace their steps. If they have the courage to completely jump over the moat and adopt Strategy A late, it may not be too late to contain at least partially the damage to their fellow citizens and to the trust they place in them.

Personally - but my opinion counts for little - I am happy to live in a nation where, despite all the naivety, shortcomings and inability of the state machine, it has been decided that no one is abandoned and that we must do it together. Perhaps from all this disaster a more united Italy will be born, with stronger social ties, greater spirit of collaboration among all, more volunteering, attention and concrete help to those in difficulty or less fortunate than us.


Perhaps, as in the United States after the great depression, a new new deal will be born. In Italy, after defeating the Nazi-fascists, our grandparents have been able to rebuild a country in rubble creating the economic boom of the 60s of the last century. Now it's up to us: we will all make it together.