LETTER: No carrots or sticks, just cricket bats
The government is unable to look beyond the political costs and benefits of its actions, especially the shutdown
At first glance one could be sympathetic to Mark Barnes’s sentiments (“More carrots, fewer sticks for this crisis (https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2020-05-06-mark-barnes-tackling-this-crisis-needs-more-carrots-and-less-sticks/)”, May 7). But he also writes that “there can be no doubt that the first action had to be shutdown”. He defends his opinion by referring to uncertainty, in this case that the exact nature of the virus was not understood.
This is problematic, first because in fact enough was known by the end of March for policymakers to have a relatively clear understanding about how the virus spreads and who it affects. We knew, for instance, that the novel coronavirus is not Ebola and that the large majority of infected people experience no or relatively mild symptoms...
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