WE ALL knew that COVID-19 had inflicted a hammer blow to the Bahamian economy. The scale of that impact is still only now becoming clear.

A new report by the Inter-American Development Bank and the Economic Commission for Latin America reports the costs of COVID to the Bahamian economy as high as $9.5bn.

And that’s just one of two economic disasters in quick succession. Paired with the impact of Hurricane Dorian, the economic loss and damage comes to $13.1bn.

That total sounds huge – because it is. It’s bigger by nearly a fifth than our forecast gross domestic product for the entire 2022-23 fiscal year.

It’s bigger than the entirety of our national debt at the end of March this year by around ten percent.

Those costs come at a national level – but they also come at a personal level. The same report says that Bahamian workers lost an estimated $2.4bn in wages between 2020 and 2023, affecting about 14.7 percent of the workforce.

More than 80 percent of that is in the tourism sector – as you’d expect with lockdowns and no tourists coming to the country to spend their money. But it goes beyond to other sectors too.

An unemployed hotel worker doesn’t have money to spend on gas. A furloughed resort manager doesn’t have money to go to a restaurant. Landlords find themselves without overseas tenants and with locals unable to make rent. Swathes of workers who thought they had money they could depend on now struggle to find money for their children’s schooling. The flow of cash through the economy to all the many different businesses suddenly stalls, and we all feel the effects. Everyone knows someone who was directly affected, even if you were lucky enough to avoid the direct impact yourself.

Now we can indulge in wishful thinking and hoping over what we could have done with that money if we’d had it, and how we could be in a better position if that was the case. We don’t. It’s a bomb blast to our economy that will reverberate down the years. Indeed, the IDB says we will never recover that loss. We may get back to where we were beforehand, but we can’t make up for the loss in those years.

What we can’t do is write such a loss off as a one-off occurrence.

Prior to COVID, there had been a feeling in some quarters that we had been lucky not to have had a pandemic for a long time. That doesn’t mean it will be another long period before another virus threatens our health and our economy – and in the ideal world, we should be better prepared.

Pandemics are a less common occurrence – but hurricanes are a fixture of our lives here in The Bahamas.

Robert Myers, of the Organisation for Responsible Governance, said that the country needs to have a “30-50 percent increase” in its economic output and “much more fiscal prudence” in order to be able to deal with such disasters.

Essentially, the suggestion is that our economy should have a buffer built in to cope with sudden multi-billion dollar losses. The long-standing scale of our deficits show we are a long way from that.

But should the burden of such costs fall only upon ourselves? That’s one of the talking points for Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis as he takes his case to international conferences, pointing out that we are not a major generator of climate change gases, but we disproportionately feel the effects of climate disasters.

The idea is that the nations who are greater polluters should offer compensation to smaller nations that feel the effects of that pollution, including in the increasing effects of storms such as Hurricane Dorian.

We can say with some certainty – and no little trepidation – that Hurricane Dorian will be far from the last major storm to affect our nation. But can we say we will be ready for it – in preparation for the physical damage or in anticipation of the economic damage? That is the buffer zone our economy needs – and which we are a long way from achieving.

Boris Johnson

There is an old British television show called “Yes, Prime Minister” based around a fictional 10 Downing Street and its occupant, the leader of Great Britain. One of his advisors, a seasoned civil servant by the name of Sir Humphrey, famously says: “To lose one Cabinet minister may be considered misfortune, but to lose two looks like carelessness.”

The current occupant of 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, seems to have been excessively careless yesterday. In a flurry of resignations yesterday which saw national broadcasters place a running total at the bottom of their screens, 44 people resigned from Mr Johnson’s government, from ministers to parliamentary secretaries and more. One more was sacked for good measure.

Mr Johnson has been staggering from one scandal to another for some time – but now faces a complete collapse of trust from his own party. As stubborn as he may be, he is surely done this time.