A Critical Need for a Simultaneous Global Lockdown against COVID-19 Pandemics

Yu-Chi Weng

Research Institute for Sustainable Civilization, Kyoto, Japan

Abstract

Lockdown is a useful social approach for controlling COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the effect is limited if lockdown is implemented only at a city or country level. Considering the iterative serious pandemics by the variants of COVID-19, a simultaneous global lockdown is suggested to eliminate the virus dispersion and reduce the economic impacts for the global society. The 2022 New Year Vacation would be a practical period for implementing the simultaneous global lockdown. A larger portion of global population participate in this act, more lives could be saved with a minimal economic cost.

After the identification of COVID-19 virus and its variants with mutation, the world suffers from great detrimental impacts during the pandemic. Since the end of 2019, many countries have implemented a variety of countermeasures for eliminating the dispersion of COVID-19 virus, e.g., keeping the social distance, wearing masks, enhancing personal and environmental disinfection, popular vaccination, and developing effective drugs. Nevertheless, many countries did not implement widespread testing for COVID-19 due to limited financial and medical service capacity, leading to the missing control of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases of COVID-19. For this reason, it is very difficult to stop the uncertain dispersion in a region, not to mention the new pandemics by the variants with mutation. Even, for vaccinated people, the variants of COVID-19 would cause bread-through infection.

As a powerful social control approach, a two-weeks or longer lockdown is considered as the ultimate tool to cut off the potential dispersion pathways, but brining about huge economic losses and potential social problems. Therefore, most countries implemented city lockdown at a minimal level to prevent from economic losses, but such limited lockdown measures could not be effective in practices. Besides, even a country or a region meets a short-term goal of virus control, a new pandemic might occur very soon after the domestic or international migration is allowed, even strict Airport quarantine is launched.

Regarding the medical measures of COVID-19, widespread testing, vaccines development and injection, and effective drug development would be of particular importance. Although some sorts of COVID-19 vaccines have been developed, it is very difficult to evaluate the effectiveness for the available vaccines to prevent from the newly-evolved types of viruses. For this reason, even vaccinated people might be infected while the risk is still under evaluation. Thus, some countries, e.g., China, US, UK, France, are suffering from a rebounding COVID-19 pandemic in recent weeks, even most citizens in these countries have been vaccinated. As a decision maker, he/she should save as more as possible lives, i.e., the value of lives, under the constraint of all costs of medical/social controlling measures as well as the huge economic depressions by the limited economic activities.

Although some cities or countries have launched emergency lockdown, and restarted the social activities when the pandemic was controlled to some extent. Nonetheless, in fact, all cases failed. The key factors might be the variants with mutation, hidden dispersions by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases, and international migrations. Once a society keep general activities and people are still travelling worldwide, a new pandemic might soon occur anywhere. It is quite difficult to control the virus dispersion domestically and globally. In this sense, local countermeasures would be failed, and global-scale countermeasures should be seriously considered with international cooperation.

For the above observations, no country could be isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic due to the trans-boundary travelling factor. Separated actions by cities or countries would be invalid. Recent trends also prove this point of view. Considering the global society as a single system, the world-scale cooperated countermeasures must be considered. Based on the city-level lockdown concept, as threatened by detrimental variants of COVID-19, the world would need a global lockdown to cut off potential dispersion pathways to the most extent. Ideally, the global lockdown could be implemented as soon as possible, but internationally political discussions and compromises would be necessary and uncertain. In order to eliminate the economic losses to the great extent, the next 2022 New Year vacation might be a good choice for the human being. I suggest that WHO and UN might play the active roles in leading the cooperation that all countries launch a uniform two-week or longer New Year vacation, except for the basic lifeline persistence support. Also, global residents must keep staying at home policy strictly, and all unnecessary travelling should be prohibited during this period. I believe such implementation would be of great help to eliminate the current global COVID-19 pandemic to the most extent level, and to get sufficient time for effective drug development and global vaccination.

Still, a variety of variants of COVID-19 virus are expected to appear in the future. It might be difficult to expect that the COVID-19 virus series become extinct, but a simultaneous global lockdown must be medically effective and economically viable to cut off the virus dispersion, to save lives due to insufficient vaccination, and to eliminate economic losses to the most extent. Without such cooperation, iterative serious pandemics and constrained economic activities would bring about much more long-term damages to the society as what occurred in recent weeks.

As the world cooperation on greenhouse gas reduction and climate change adaptation, much more global cooperation would be necessary for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. Facing the uncertainty of COVID-19 virus characteristics and its detrimental threats, we could make a world difference if the global political leaders make a good judgement now, to save millions of lives and recover the regular global economy.

Yu-Chi Weng

2021.7.16

unpublished comment