For Some Emerging Economies, New Covid Wave Spawns New Thinking
The developing world is facing the omicron onslaught with new realism.
Earlier waves of the virus let to restrictions that choked Thailand’s vital tourism industry. This time, the government ruled out a lockdown, even a partial one, treating Covid as endemic in 2022.
Photographer: Andre Malerba/BloombergDeveloping nations brought to their knees by earlier waves of Covid-19 -- Brazil, India, Indonesia and others -- are only now contending with the highly-contagious omicron variant that has been ripping for weeks through Europe and North America. With the advantage of watching it play out elsewhere, some are rejiggering policies so as not to eliminate the virus but to live with it.
In a way, the idea is old, not new. In 2020, when the pandemic began, leaders of Mexico and Brazil rejected lockdowns and quarantines, saying the damage they’d bring outweighed the sickness and death coronavirus threatened.