Cure the covid19 credibility gap

LIKE a broken record, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh on Monday repeated his call for people to comply with covid19 regulations.

“Please abide,” Mr Deyalsingh said. He was crying into the wilderness – a wilderness partly of the State’s own making.

Even at the start of this pandemic, when fear was at its highest alongside the State’s goodwill, many declined to respond to moral suasion.

Since then, two crucial things have occurred which have all but obliterated public officials’ moral authority to tell citizens what to do.

The first relates to the erratic shifts in the official statistics. Explanations have been offered by career public servants – whose professionalism we do not question – about lags in processing, delays in receiving “batched” results, and the reporting relationship between public organs and private labs.

Such explanations have not cured confusion. Nor have they assuaged a creeping sense that the official count is an arbitrary figure subject to qualification.

Mr Deyalsingh on Monday spoke of the country reaching the “unenviable milestone” of 1,000 cases over the weekend, but we will have to wait and see if that timeline holds.

The next major issue is the poor examples set by the two main parties during the general election campaign.

It began on nomination day, continued throughout motorcades and walkabouts, featured at assemblies. On election night, the Prime Minister wore a mask but was not distant enough to avoid contact with a covid19-positive fan. Earlier in the day, the Opposition Leader said she saw no reason to discourage supporters assembling at Rienzi.

What was good for Peter was not good for Paul.

The bitter fruit: the PM in quarantine; positive cases swirling around Mrs Persad-Bissessar.

“There are still pockets of persons who feel these measures do not apply to them,” Mr Deyalsingh said.

In this he found common ground with the perception of people in the street.

Election or not, the State was supposed to pass the baton to citizens, not drop the baton completely.

The Health Minister’s apology last week about testing delays was a step in the right direction. But if the State – in its widest sense – is to restore its credibility on covid19, it needs to acknowledge its errors. It needs to take bold, non-partisan action.

A good place to start might be Parliament, where officials have suggested harsher laws in the works. If this is to be the case, Government and Opposition have no choice but to work together.

Or else risk what we have seen internationally, where countries that have allowed political considerations to inflect their responses have not done well. Look at the US, Brazil and the UK.

We should learn from the death toll of each of those countries.