COMMENT | Visualising pandemic's end pointless if no game plan

COMMENT | It seems like there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Well, that is what it seems when Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced the government’s recovery plan from the Covid-19 pandemic early this week. It was as if we could all see the light and we just needed to work towards the goal. Maybe I can use a sports analogy to illustrate my point.

When I used to play basketball in school and university, coaches would always tell us to imagine the end goal of winning a game or a tournament. It’s basically the visualisation of an achievement so that you will have the will to achieve it. But this visualisation is always followed up with a game plan. Just visualisation alone doesn’t work.

So if you think about it, really, when the government announced the recovery plan which involves various stages, it was based on actually achieving something first. Each stage is to be executed only after we had achieved something such as a certain reduced number of daily infections or a lower load on nationwide ICUs.

The recovery plan sounds great. It has made me impatient for September to come. Everything will start opening up (and I can start playing basketball again!) and the promise of an elusive Parliament session has gotten me quite excited. Visualisation has really gotten me worked up and I’ve been thinking about the end of the year so much now.

Then, based on the experience of my old basketball training, I started thinking of the next step I would have to do which is a game plan so that all that visualisation works out. But I didn’t know what the plan was. Is it a lockdown? We’ve had three lockdowns already. The Covid-19 numbers haven’t really gone down.

Will it be another emergency? We did that (still doing it!) and the numbers actually increased many folds during the emergency. Is it by closing the schools? We’ve closed down the schools so many times that my children are probably more familiar with a ...