The coronavirus pandemic has left governments around the world facing a dilemma: Should they go all out to halt the spread of COVID-19 and keep human losses as low as possible, or, while working to curb the virus, should they prioritise mitigating its inevitable harm to the economy?

The ideal response would be to find an optimal point between the two that minimises the negative effects of each.

However, lacking vital information on the novel coronavirus that allows them to make healthy predictions, governments have been forced to make a choice between imposing economically crippling comprehensive lockdowns and keeping the economy running, at the cost of a high rate of infection.

The vast majority of countries have opted for the former, aiming to withstand the financial pain and then reboot their economies as soon as the pandemic is brought under control. Those with the means – a strong currency, price stability and zero interest – have been able to loosen the purse strings to keep the economy ticking. Those without have instead made the maximum use of low-interest loans from the International Monetary Fund.

The response by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government to the pandemic has been a little different, defined at first by showing little regard to the threat of the virus and an excessive display of self-confidence.

The government called Turkey the country best-prepared to deal with the pandemic; officials said that factories would move from China to Turkey once it was over; they said a limited stimulus package that provided 2.5 billion liras ($360 million) of income support to the country’s poorest would be sufficient to protect the country.

But when the virus began to spread, the government was forced to alter its position, gradually imposing tighter restrictions and curfews, and ramping up testing and quarantine for Turks returning from abroad.

Finally, at the insistence of the science commission that the Health Ministry has employed to advise it on the coronavirus, the government announced weekend lockdowns in major cities. But it has not yet come close to imposing any longer, more comprehensive lockdowns.

As the number of infections rapidly rose, the government changed its view of the coronavirus and began to take the threat seriously, so why has it resisted such measures? It seems to me that the government fears that it could not dig its way out of the economic rubble if it imposes this kind of lockdown.

The government knows that it has neither the funds to keep stuttering manufacturers afloat, nor to provide a minimal safety net for the millions who have lost their income thanks to the pandemic. It could have secured aid from the IMF, but its own ideological hang-ups have closed that door. Instead, it rushed to launch a national donation drive with the slogan “We are self-sufficient”, while also barring opposition-held municipalities from running their own campaigns.

And the government continues to flip-flop between measures. On the one hand, there are rumours that it plans to implement a full lockdown for six days from April 18-24, a period that also includes the April 23 public holiday and would end at the start of Ramadan. On the other, a new package of economic measures has been presented to parliament.

I am no epidemiologist, and I cannot say how beneficial these piecemeal impositions of lockdowns will be. The slowdown in the rate of newly diagnosed infections at the beginning of the week was a good sign. If last Friday’s rush to stock up on supplies after the Interior Ministry called a lockdown at two hours’ notice does not cause a large rise in infections, then new infections in the country could peak by the end of April, and I hope this is the case.

The bad news is that the economic damage the coronavirus is wreaking on the economy gets worse with each passing day, to an extent that is still unclear. Even graver is that it seems very unlikely that the funding available will be sufficient to prevent social collapse, even to a minimal extent.

The IMF’s most recent forecasts on the pandemic’s economic impact predicted a global income loss of 3 percent, with a 7.5 percent loss in the EU and a 5 percent loss in Turkey. My prediction of zero growth was far more optimistic. I reasoned that after losses of more than 20 percent in the second quarter, the economic gears would start turning again over the rest of the year, and growth in the third and fourth quarters could mitigate much of those losses and leave GDP at around last year’s level.

Even if this optimistic scenario is accurate, the level of unemployment and lost income is frightening. The pandemic reached Turkey at a time when unemployment was already high, at slightly above 4 million in January.

I predict that at least 3 million more people will become unemployed in the coming months. In this case, even if the labour force does not grow, we are looking at unemployment above 20 percent. What is worse, the rate of long-term unemployment – people who have been seeking a job for a year or more – would also leap.

The number of long-term unemployed rose to 750,000 in 2017, and by 2019 it had risen to more than 1 million, or one out of every four unemployed people. If the coronavirus does push the number of unemployed people up to 7 million, then an optimistic estimate is that one-third of these will be long-term unemployed, bringing that figure to 2.3 million.

When you take these masses, who are not eligible for unemployment benefit, and add them to the millions of employees likely to effectively be laid off and surviving on the government’s 1,170-lira ($170) monthly payment for workers on unpaid leave, the scale of the social collapse threatening Turkey becomes clear.

In the face of this threat, the new stimulus package presented to parliament is wholly inadequate. The package bans employers from laying staff off, but they are free to place them on unpaid leave. When the law is passed, this will create a new category of “employed unemployed” people who still have jobs on paper, but are forced to get by on the $170 per month provided by the government.

For the many unregistered workers who have lost their jobs, and all the street vendors, local tradesmen and artisans whose income has vanished, the package provides nothing. They will have to make do with whatever modest support the Family and Social Service Ministry provides.

It is already clear what must be done: Every citizen should be given six months of stable support at minimum wage levels. This is the only practical solution. There is no point in fussing over how much to give and who deserves to receive it. Those most in need will benefit greatly from this, while it will make very little difference to the rich.

Of course, this raises the predictable question of where the money will come from. But the answer is not too difficult. A prudent amount of money can be printed, a few billion dollars can be secured from the IMF, unnecessary public expenditure can be cut and the Treasury-guaranteed payments to companies that have undertaken public-private partnership infrastructure projects postponed for a year. And there are other ways. No one should expect any miracles, but it would at least mitigate the damage to a considerable extent.

But one question remains: How able and how willing is Erdoğan’s administration to take this kind of radical step?