As the UK buckled under the pressure of Covid-19 during April and May, I, like many others, looked at SA’s management of the pandemic, with its early and strict lockdown, and thought admiringly that the country would be spared the worst of it.
It is true that SA’s initial policy approach — enforcing one of the world’s most draconian lockdowns — slowed the spread of the virus and provided the health-care system with enough time to institute the protocols required. But last week the coronavirus started to hit SA hard, as it spread like wildfire through the dense and poverty-stricken townships, with daily infection rates now among the world’s highest.
SA has now surpassed the UK, with the total number of cases at more than 300,000 across a smaller population, and this with a much lower testing rate of roughly 40 per 1,000 people compared with the UK’s 106 per 1,000 people. Hopefully, the death-to-infection rate will remain comparatively much lower than the UK’s given SA’s younger population.
As SA begins to enter the nightmare of the coronavirus peak, after easing the lockdown following calls to open its economy, I want to emphasise to SA and global policymakers: there is no choice between the virus and the economy. Containing the virus must come first.
I am also hearing that the virus has unmasked existing problems in SA’s health-care system, with public hospitals Baragwanath and Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital fast becoming overwhelmed, many medical staff testing positive and declining supplies of personal protective equipment.
SA’s neighbours across the wider African continent, where cases are also rapidly doubling, are looking at these developments, terrified at the potential consequences for their own urban poor and weaker health-care systems.
As SA begins to enter the nightmare of the coronavirus peak, after easing the lockdown following calls to open its economy, I want to emphasise to SA and global policymakers: there is no choice between the virus and the economy. Containing the virus must come first.
The reintroduction of local lockdowns in Spain, the US and Leicester in the UK has shown that giving in to pressure to open the economy too early results in flare-ups and repeated lockdowns, frittering away the hard work and earlier sacrifices of initial lockdowns. This is how we got to the present situation, after SA flattened its peak in April and then gave in to calls from the business community and commentariat to open up the economy.
Yes, the UK and Spain have better infrastructure, but SA is becoming one of the worst-hit nations globally in the pandemic. Local lockdowns are now inevitable, as much as the need is for economic activity to accelerate. It is obviously more sensible to put the management and potential eradication of the virus first, and then figure out ways to reorganise the economic, social and hygiene norms and public spending.
There are so many alternatives to industrialised urbanisation as a pathway to growth. Particularly given that the outcomes for those economies have been widespread inequality, which has meant that in the UK, US and SA black, marginalised communities have come out worst, having the kinds of essential jobs, nutrient-deficient diets and cramped living conditions that put them most at risk of contracting the virus.
Black, urban poor has been the segment of these populations that has borne the highest economic cost of the pandemic lockdowns, particularly in Africa, where many live hand-to-mouth. The intensity of their poverty does not mean their lives are expendable to the virus.
As we learnt globally to live with the much less contagious HIV/Aids pandemic and understand the preventive measures and mass education campaigns required to protect ourselves, and treatment regimes to prolong quality of life, so we will have to learn to live with and understand Covid-19, through fastidious handwashing, mask-wearing and social distancing measures until treatment and care improves along with scientific understanding of the disease.
• Dr Masie, a former senior editor of the Financial Mail, is chief strategist at IC Publications in London and a fellow of the Wits School of Governance.
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