Alex Shams
After 7 weeks of partial lock-down, shops and markets across Iran re-open this week. The Coronavirus “curve” has flattened and there’s a sense that the worst is over – or at least, the first “peak.”
Theaters, cinemas, restaurants, cafes, gyms, schools, universities, mosques, shrines are all closed, but ordinary shops and enclosed shopping areas (bazaars and malls) are open. In Iran, schools have been shut since late February – more than double as long as in the US – and they remain shut. Iran joins Italy and Spain, which were hit around the same time way before the US, in beginning partially lifting restrictions this week.
Things were coming to a point where either the lockdown continues and people begin starving at home, or the lockdown ends and the numbers of infected go up again. This will be a problem confronting cash-strapped countries around the world very soon; after a few weeks of telling people to stay home, if you can’t pay them enough to live and get food to them, large numbers of people will start getting sick and dying in lockdown. They’ll run out of food and money to buy new food.
In Iran the government has promised (and delivered) some degree of cash payments and an interest-free loan to people; because of crippling US sanctions Trump imposed in 2018, the government was severely cash-strapped before the crisis.
Iran applied to the IMF for $5 billion last week for coronavirus relief – and Trump, in an absolutely inhumane move, pushed the fund to deny them the money. Iran is also having trouble getting medical supplies, ventilators, test kits due to US sanctions.
So far the virus has mostly ravaged Europe and the US; but as it hits other parts of South America, Africa, and Asia, money will become a bigger issue. These countries will desperately need relief from IMF loan repayments. Even in the US, they haven’t managed to properly ensure sufficient monthly payments to help people survive. Now imagine elsewhere.
My sense of the future is that there might be numerous peaks; every few weeks, quarantine measures might be re-introduced to bring the numbers back down, and then when they’ve come down far enough, the lock down is relaxed again.
In the new “normal,” people will be permanently discouraged from socializing and hanging out, at least until a vaccine is invented and spread and medical professionals figure out treatment.
Just some observations from the future. This is a long road we’re going down…
(Alex is an Iranian- American writer and a PhD student of Anthropology based in Tehran, Iran)
