India is shutting down its domestic flights today in order to stop the spread of Covid-19. This comes a day after shutting down the national railways and most inter-city buses. States and districts have imposed border controls to control the movement of people across borders.
The immediate reaction to this would be that this is a regressive step. After a few decades of higher integration (national and international) this drawing of borders at minute levels might seem retrogade. Moreover, the right of a citizen to move anywhere in India is a fundamental right, and so this closing of borders might seem like a violation of fundamental rights as well.
However, the nature of the Covid-19 bug is that such measures are not only permissible but also necessary. The evidence so far is that it has a high rate of transmission between people who meet each other – far higher than for any other flu. The mortality rate due to the illness the bug causes is also low enough that each sick person has the opportunity to infect a large number of others before recovery or death (compared to this, diseases such as Ebola had a much higher death rate, which limited its transmission).
So far no cure for Covid-19 has been found. Instead, the most optimal strategy has been found to prevent infected people from meeting uninfected people. And since it is hard to know who is infected yet (since it takes time for symptoms to develop), the strategy is to prevent people from meeting each other. In fact, places like Wuhan, where the disease originated, managed to stem the disease by completely shutting down the city (it’s about the size of Bangalore).
In this context, open borders (at whatever level) can present a huge threat to Covid-19 containment. You might manage to completely stem the spread of the disease in a particular region, only to see it reappear with a vengeance thanks to a handful of people who came in (Singapore and HongKong have witnessed exactly this).
For this reason, the first step for a region to try and get free of the virus is to “stop importing” it. The second step is to shut down the region itself so that the already infected don’t meet the uninfected and transmit the disease to them.
Also, a complete shutdown can be harmful to the economy, which has already taken a massive battering from the disease. So for this reason, the shutdown is best done at as small a level as possible, so that the overall disruption is minimised. Also different regions might need different levels of shutdown in order to contain the disease. For all these reasons, the handling of the virus is best done at as local a level as possible. City/town better than district better than state better than country.
And once the spread of the disease has been stopped in a region, we should be careful that we don’t import it after that, else all the good work gets undone. For this reason, the border controls need to remain for a while longer until transmission has stopped in neighbouring (and other) regions.
It’s a rather complex process, but the main points to be noted are that the containment has to happen at a local level, and once it has been contained, we need to be careful to not import it. And for both these to happen, it is necessary that borders be shut down.