Nine days in­to 2022, the same is­sues that were sem­i­nal to the coun­try’s per­for­mance on all fronts, so­cial, po­lit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic in 2021 re­main with us. The world is in the third year of Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, a glob­al prob­lem which re­mains at the top of this year’s agen­da. New strains are test­ing the world’s abil­i­ty to re­spond at every lev­el. The key de­fen­sive mea­sures re­main the same; vac­ci­na­tion, san­i­tiz­ing, so­cial dis­tanc­ing mea­sures in­clud­ing the wear­ing of masks. Their ef­fi­ca­cy de­pends on en­force­ment.

Most coun­tries re­ly on bor­der con­trols to pre­vent the un­vac­ci­nat­ed from en­ter­ing. In Aus­tralia, the re­vo­ca­tion of No­vak Djokovic’s visa and his vac­cine ex­emp­tion il­lus­trate the deep­en­ing di­vide on vac­ci­na­tion as a de­fen­sive mea­sure. In many coun­tries, manda­to­ry vac­ci­na­tion poli­cies are now key ob­jec­tives, in­di­vid­ual lib­er­ty ver­sus the need to pro­tect the many. The key lessons of the last two years are in­ter­na­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tion, the ded­i­ca­tion of re­searchers and health care work­ers and the will­ing­ness of lo­cal and na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ties to co­op­er­ate.

Glob­al­ly the math is clear. Vac­ci­na­tion may not be a per­fect so­lu­tion, but it re­duces the sever­i­ty of the dis­ease and re­duces the risk of death if one is in­fect­ed. Of the 3,000 odd deaths in TT, less than 200 have been vac­ci­nat­ed mean­ing that more than 93% of the dead were un­vac­ci­nat­ed. This sta­tis­tic ought to be telling enough, yet vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy re­mains high. The of­fi­cial sta­tis­tics in­di­cate that on­ly 48.1% of the pop­u­la­tion are ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed plac­ing TT amongst the coun­tries with the low­est vac­ci­na­tion rates.

The uni­formed ser­vices are amongst those agen­cies with the low­est vac­ci­na­tion rates. Yet these ser­vices are in the front­line of en­forc­ing reg­u­la­tions deal­ing with be­hav­ioral health is­sues. It was note­wor­thy that amongst the two hun­dred plus “par­ty boat” rev­el­ers “processed” were sev­er­al “off-du­ty” po­lice­men. This sug­gests that vac­cine hes­i­tan­cy might al­so be a fac­tor lim­it­ing the ef­fi­ca­cy of be­hav­ioral en­force­ment.

It has been wide­ly ac­cept­ed that end­ing the pan­dem­ic is the key pre­req­ui­site to restor­ing jobs, liveli­hoods, and eco­nom­ic well-be­ing. Low­er vac­ci­na­tion rates are as­so­ci­at­ed with low­er eco­nom­ic growth or a de­cline in eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty. Cit­i­zens can­not re­ly on the en­er­gy sec­tor’s per­for­mance to re­verse the gov­ern­ment’s con­tin­u­ing deficits. In­deed, the re­cent de­cline in nat­ur­al gas prices sug­gest that the surge was tem­po­rary, and re­lief will not come from that di­rec­tion. There­fore, the coun­try needs to be healthy to ad­dress the eco­nom­ic chal­lenges which con­front us.

There are sig­nals that an in­fla­tion­ary spi­ral has be­gun to in­crease the cost of liv­ing. It is not clear if this is tem­po­rary. What is clear is that Gov­ern­ment has no ca­pac­i­ty to lim­it the im­pact of in­fla­tion. There­fore, the eco­nom­ic chal­lenges will be dif­fi­cult for every­one and they can­not be solved sim­ply by in­creased wage de­mands if the econ­o­my is not per­form­ing. Much de­pends on the good­will and good sense of the unions and gov­ern­ment in their dis­cus­sions in com­ing days. The coun­try can­not af­ford for ei­ther to fail.

.