The government’s periodic bans on alcohol sales during the coronavirus pandemic were associated with a significant reduction in deaths from non-natural causes, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed SA Medical Journal.
It challenges recent research funded by the alcohol industry, which concluded that curfews played a much bigger role than restrictions on alcohol sales in reducing the trauma load on hospitals during SA’s various lockdown levels.
The research commissioned by the SA Liquor Brand Owners Association (Salba), released in April, was not published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The liquor industry has lobbied hard against the government’s intermittent restrictions on alcohol sales, saying they have cost SA an estimated 200,000 jobs, R36.3bn in lost sales and R27bn in taxes.
The SA Medical Journal study, published on Friday, found complete alcohol sales bans were associated with a significant decline in the weekly number of unnatural deaths reported in SA. With the exception of a six-week period after the first hard lockdown, partial sales restrictions did not have this effect.
Unnatural deaths are those due to accidents and violence, while death from natural causes comes about from disease or other health conditions.
While bans on alcohol sales were effective in the short term at reducing deaths and alleviating the associated load on emergency and health services, these are blunt tools and do not offer a long-term solution to SA’s alcohol problems, said the paper’s lead author, Tom Moultrie, director of UCT’s Centre for Actuarial Research.
Other policy solutions should be considered, such as limiting the size of products, setting minimum unit pricing and raising the legal drinking age, he said.
The researchers used weekly death data collected by the Medical Research Council and UCT as part of their routine surveillance of mortality trends in SA. They assessed the effect of bans on alcohol sales, partial restrictions on sales, and curfews (using Google mobility data) on deaths from unnatural causes.
They found total sales bans were associated with a significant decline in unnatural deaths, ranging from a 49% fall below usual during the level 5 lockdown, which began on March 27 2020 and included a stay-at-home order, to a 26% decline when a subsequent booze ban was accompanied by a curfew of between four and seven hours. During the six-week level 5 lockdown, there were on average 517 fewer unnatural deaths than usual per week, more than 3,100 in total.
Moultrie said the effect of liquor sales bans could be expected to diminish over time, as people stockpiled in advance and illicit alcohol sales channels had been established.
The findings are consistent with data from previously published research that found trauma admissions fell 65% at Worcester Hospital and admissions to Tygerberg Hospital’s intensive care unit fell 50% during the hard lockdown, he said.
Salba chair Sibane Mngadi said the association is reviewing the SA Medical Journal study to understand how the researchers determined that alcohol sales bans had a greater effect than curfews and restrictions on movement. “All four total sales bans that the industry has been subjected to have been accompanied by a curfew of 9pm or earlier. We would like to better understand how they have eliminated the effect of the 9pm curfew to arrive at the conclusion that it was only the total ban of alcohol sales that produced the observed outcomes,” he said.
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