Some Practical Questions about the Coronavirus Epidemic
Restrictions that allow a significant number of people to move about, either with official approval or unsanctioned “black market” activity, cannot stop the spread of contagious diseases.
Like everyone else, I’ve been reading the mainstream media reports on the Coronavirus epidemic. I haven’t found any information about the practicalities that immediately occur to me, such as:
1. When public transportation is halted and commerce grinds to a halt as people avoid public places and gatherings, thousands of employees no longer go to work. Who pays their wages while the city is locked down? The employers? Then who compensates the employers, since their income has also gone to zero?
Does China have a universal unemployment insurance system that can quickly issue payments to all people who are no longer going to work and getting a paycheck from an employer?
What about the thousands of migrant workers who don’t have regular employers? Who pays them? If they’re technically not officially sanctioned residents of the city, they don’t exist in government records.
2. If people idled by the lockdown are supposed to live off savings, what about all the marginal workers with few resources? What are they going to live on once their meager savings are gone?
3. Given the choice of obeying the lockdown rules and starving or slipping out of the city to find paid work somewhere else, how many migrant workers will choose to slip away?
4. Unlike the developed West, many people in China still have ancestral villages to return to, rural towns where their grandparents or or other close relatives live. If work has dried up and you’re fearful of catching a potentially lethal virus, wouldn’t it make sense to slip out of the city and make your way back to the village where you can hunker down until the epidemic blows over?
Since people who caught the virus may not know they’re a carrier, how will this migration not spread the disease to rural areas with few medical resources?
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