COVID Underdogs: Sri Lanka
By: Indi Samarajiva
Tags: World, Government, Sri Lanka, Coronavirus, Covid 19

COVID Underdogs: Sri Lanka

Like New Zealand except better

In lieu of a wedding, Darshana Kumara Wijenarayana and Pawani Rasanga gave to the needy

As a note, Sri Lanka didn’t test enough, had a resurgence and is absolutely struggling with its second wave. 🤦🏾‍♂️

Sri Lanka is used to disaster. Over the last 15 years, I’ve lived through a tsunami, war, more terrorism than I can count, floods, riots, and been hospitalized with dengue. Shit just happens every few years.

Sri Lanka, however, is not a disaster.

Throughout all of this, we remain a beautiful, friendly, and generally safe place to visit and be. Rather than making us weak, generations of hard experience has made us strong. We are used to collective sacrifice. We do not debate killing our elders. We are resilient, like many of the nations you only see on the bad news.

In fighting COVID-19, that resilience served us well.

We crushed it.

Sri Lanka reacted early (<100 cases), reacted hard (total lockdown), and has almost completely eliminated COVID-19 from our shores. Over 100 grueling days later, we have no community spread, and — masks on — have returned to life. I went to the beach. I saw my 96-year old Achchi after three months. She was so happy and yet so short that she kissed my wife’s boob.

Forget New Zealand. Jacinda Ardern is great, but Sri Lanka is an island with 4x the population that has crushed the curve harder and flatter than them.

This is what we did.

First Case Wedding

Sri Lanka’s first recovered case

For a long time, Sri Lanka only had one case, imported from China on January 27th. She was tested, treated, recovered. Getting out, she basically had a wedding with the Minister of Health and DG of Health Services. This was, in hindsight incorrect, but sweet. We never blamed China or the WHO, we just worked with them and saved our own asses.

Being paranoid, many Sri Lankans immediately bought or improvised face masks in January. I scoffed, but I was wrong. That paranoia was wise.

After Patient 1 recovered, things were quiet for a month and a half. Then we got hit. It wasn’t from China, which had their shit together. Our epidemic arrived via Italy.

Next Case Dreading

The Navy rehearsing in March. Navy personnel would ultimately suffer more infections than the rest of the country combined.

On March 10th, a Sri Lankan tour guide was confirmed as being infected, likely via Italian tourists. He passed the infection on. We had local transmission. By March 10th, our epidemic had truly begun.

The whole country tensed up, except for the literal old boys of our two most irresponsible schools — Royal and St. Thomas — who insisted on having a dayslong drinking party. Predictably, an infected airline pilot was there, and the whole country was on edge.

At this point, things could have easily gone either way. Italy rapidly accelerated from less than 100 cases to tens of thousands and Sri Lanka was on the same trajectory. Everybody was, that’s just the curve.

And don’t say Sri Lanka just got lucky, or it’s the climate. Yes, it’s hotter than Satan’s taint here, but COVID-19 is so rabid and new that it spreads regardless. We saw it rapidly go from one person to hundreds in the Navy. So no, we didn’t just get lucky.

We just took right action, at the right time. There was strong, largely military leadership from President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, our well developed public health sector, and especially the Epidemiology Unit, themselves battle-hardened from fighting malaria and dengue.

In the public, there was widespread compliance and support. The doctor’s union stopped meddling in politics and gave good medical advice, for once. Nurses, doctors, cops, and troops all showed up to work. Dengue labs converted to run PCR tests and sequenced the full genome of our local strain. The larger public just masked up, shut up, and stayed home.

We didn’t waste time debating whether disasters exist. Everyone in this country has experienced some disaster, we know. Nothing like COVID, but if someone says a weird word like tsunami we don’t ask, we just move.

Sri Lanka reacted fast, we reacted aggressively, and that made all the difference.

Two weeks to eternity

The airport before it closed

Every country had two weeks. From the minute you get your first confirmed case, the clock is ticking, and it runs out after 100. Once you hit 100 cases you’re already dead, you just don’t know it yet. What each country did in those first two weeks echoed through eternity.

Countries that acted fast — like Korea, Mongolia, or Trinidad & Tobago — survived. Countries that dithered — like the US or UK — were hammered and will never suppress the virus now. Those two weeks were a window and it closed.

Sri Lanka made the most of it.

Within five days of the first local case (March 15th), Sri Lanka banned travel from much of Europe, Iran, and Korea. For some reason, we exempted the UK, but it rapidly became clear that they were the worst. Within a day we banned flights from there as well.

During this time things were changing every hour. My wife and one child were in the UK and barely got back on one of the last flights in (we self-quarantined). I know people just stuck in Sweden or the US. Many more got stuck in the Middle East. By March 22nd the airport was completely closed.

This was a huge sacrifice. We cut off the entire tourism industry like a gangrenous limb. We left thousands of Sri Lankans stranded abroad. But it worked.

Closing borders does not stop a pandemic, it just limits the size of the problem you have to deal with it. It makes test/trace/isolate possible. If we’d shut later we’d have had thousands of cases to find. If we’d shut earlier it could have been zero. As it was I think we had a few hundred to start. It was tremendously difficult to find and contain everything, but we did (inshallah).

Because we had fewer cases, we had time to scale up our defenses before the virus went viral. That’s why we’re able to safely open up now.

Above all, it was those two weeks. Because the Sri Lankan government acted in those two weeks, we saved thousands of lives and our entire economy. Our health system is good, but we have zero flex in the ICUs. We would have gotten hammered. Even waiting 12 days cost us 11 lives. Waiting any longer would have cost hundreds or thousands more. It could have cost everything.

That’s why we shut everything down.

Total Curfew