At the gates of Rome

The strategy being taken in Italy is, interesting! Locking down a whole country, a modern, free, liberal country, is quite a challenge and relies mainly upon the goodwill of the people to actually achieve anything. I suggest the goodwill is a finite thing and that after a maximum of two weeks the people of Italy will have had enough.

It is not just a simple matter of asking 60 million people to effectively self isolate, it is the myriad number of other impacts. Children not being educated or allowed out to play, the massive financial impact upon a country that has the past decade trying not to declare a state wide national emergency and who's bond rates have always been perilous in financial markets but now must surely be turning somewhat toxic. People travel to Italy from all over the world to savour its many many delights from beaches, to hills, history and food and wine, and of course the delightful Italian people themselves.

And so this 'lock down' will have massive impact upon the country and one that could cause financial contagion across Europe which the rest of the world will also get to enjoy. But this is an experiment so we will all get to watch it as it progresses.

That on its own is not the most curious thing to me. I can understand trying to extinguish a fire like this virus by smothering it through isolation techniques. That makes sense. If you isolate everybody sufficiently well for the natural lifetime of the virus, about two weeks, then you should see flames subside with only pockets left to deal with after that period. Except, to me, it kinda requires everybody else in the world to do the same.

If, after two weeks of lock-down, the problem in Italy has become more containable and the lock-down is lifted so that normality can resume. That's fine, but what about all the travellers from, for instance, the UK or USA or Argentina where the virus might well only be reaching a peek and no lock-down has been put in place? How then does Italy deal with international visitors, for both tourism and business when they already know that early stage carriers cannot be simply detected without a throat swab and lab test! What then will Italy be doing?

Of course now is the best, or maybe just more opportune, possible time to be trying to do this in Italy, it is in the off-peak period before the bulk of tourism to the country so it makes sense to have a lock-down now rather than try it in the sweltering heat of Summer when the bulk of tourist revenue is enjoyed.

In some sense this year will be written off. It might be that this year everybody has to simply say, never happened. In that sense maybe all children have to redo the year at school they are in and university students too and maybe businesses get some kind of leeway in reporting results and debt holidays including taxes and maybe every individual should also get the same allowances ie no foreclosure on mortgages not being paid or any other debts and no tax being collected on individuals. Plus every government in the world effectively borrows money to service social services in the country just for this year so that nobody starves or has extreme hardship due to the effective shut down of normality. Then, in 2021 when the saviours in white coats have found a vaccine then we can start afresh, just with a little more debt in tow, but that was always going to happen anyway.

Who knows, but for now, take care and watch with a degree of interest as to how this virus is tackled and see if we can learn from it because one thing is certain, there will be another one and it will come sooner than you will expect.