I understand how CM Murad Shah's impassioned appeals for a complete nationwide lockdown might appeal to some. The spread of #COVID19 can only be enabled, initially, by extreme social distancing. But just that, ON ITS OWN, won't solve the problem.
The whole point of a lockdown is to prevent the spread of the virus WHILE you take other steps. Broadly, these fall into two buckets: (1) testing, tracing, quarantine (TTQ) to identify & isolate infected individuals, and (2) build capacity in your healthcare system.
For each of those two categories, there are multiple things you need to do. Take TTQ, for instance: test kits, labs, microbiologists, PPE, logistics, waste disposal, are just a few of the considerations. Here's a thread I posted earlier about this:
We have capacity to test just a few thousand per day, and @Asad_Umar and team are trying to build that up to 25,000 per day. The UK, as we speak, is building up to 100,000 per day. To get to the South Korea level of testing, we need to test two million people. The gap is massive.
And that is just the beginning. Once you've tested, you need isolation facilities, staffed & equipped, and the ability to track and test close contacts of those who test positive. That involves NADRA data, cellphone & banking data, and the ability to process it.
Sindh doesn't have any of that TTQ capability. Neither does anyone else. So, what purpose would a lockdown (even you WERE able to enforce it, which is clearly not the case in Karachi, for instance) actually serve? Beyond just some positive television news soundbites?
If you can't implement massive testing to identify infected individuals, isolate them, track their contacts, test them, and so on, once the lockdown is lifted, they're back out spreading the virus.
The only other logical benefit may be that they get better within the lockdown period and are not infectious any more once you lift it. That requires a full - near one hundred percent - lockdown, which, as we know and have seen, is close to impossible to achieve.
And people will still be getting sick in the meantime. Which brings me to the second capability that you build during the lockdown: healthcare infrastructure. After, what is it now? thirty years, on and off? of PPP rule in Sindh, that's just a madman's dream.
There is no ambulance service, very limited intensive care beds (none in many of the rural districts), just a handful of ventilators, a severe lack of human resource. What do you do with that in 14 or 28 or 42 days of lockdown? Seriously, if you had 14 weeks, what could you do?
If you were really good, you might build a few field hospitals, that would hold a few thousand beds. But that would be woefully inadequate. Imagine Dadu, Jacobabad, Nawabshah, even Larkana. No, forget those. Even Karachi and Hyderabad. Barely makes a dent.
Sindh has a population of 48 million people. If just 10% of those were infected, and just 1% of those needed a hospital bed, you would need 48,000 beds. That's more than the total number of hospital beds in the whole province, including maternity beds. And they are full!
So, if you can't enforce a lockdown, and if you can't test, trace, & quarantine, and if you can't treat those who do get sick, and if you can't build capacity to deal with the patient load you will get after the lockdown is lifted, what's the point? What. Is. The. POINT???
All you do is push an already poor population in destitution and desperation. And when families are faced with starvation, when children start dying of hunger, guess what will happen? Protests, riots, looting, chaos. That's what.
