In a recent publication, the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation forecast that the SA economy will contract 11.5% in 2020. This will be the largest contraction of the world’s biggest developed and emerging economies. Argentina, with a GDP collapse of 11.2%, will have the second-largest contraction.
SA and Argentina have two other things in common. Their lockdowns were among the most severe in the world, according to the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Stringency Index, a composite measure based on nine responses to the coronavirus, such as workplace and school closures.
The two countries have also had little success in bringing the coronavirus under control, as many Asian countries have done. SA, with a population of 59.6-million, has the world’s 10th highest number of infections. At the time of writing, it has had 670,766 cases and 16,398 deaths. Argentina, with a population of 44.5-million, has the world’s ninth highest number of infections at 711,325 cases and 15,749 deaths. SA and Argentina have not managed to save livelihoods and lives. They have shown that there is no correlation between the stringency of a lockdown and success in bringing the coronavirus under control.
In a recent Financial Times article, Harvard economics professor James Stock wrote that lockdowns are neither necessary nor sufficient to suppress Covid-19. Public health experts say lockdowns do not break transmission chains, but only delay the spread of the virus. They can buy time for governments to implement public health measures that can interrupt transmission chains.
Hand hygiene, wearing masks, social distancing and banning super-spreader events can prevent people from getting infected. But once they are infected, there are public health measures that can suppress the virus by “reducing the circulating pool of contagious individuals”, Stock says. These are rapid testing, contact tracing, isolation of infected people and quarantining close contacts who may not be infected.
Many Asian countries have shown how to save livelihoods and lives without hard lockdowns. According to a recent Asian Development Bank (ADB) publication, the region will contract by only 0.7% during 2020. “Containment measures were less strict in parts of East Asia, where economies such as the Republic of Korea and Taipei, China, relied more on extensive testing, extensive contact tracing and localised quarantines aiming to isolate virus outbreaks while still allowing continued mobility and economic activity.”
South Korea’s economy will contract by only 1% during 2020, according to the ADB. The country, with a population of 51.6-million, has had only 23,661 cases and 406 deaths. It has not had a second wave. Recently, it had a cluster of cases from a church that had defied social-distancing guidelines and held an antigovernment rally with 10,000 people. The cluster was extinguished quickly through “test and trace” policies.
World stock markets got the jitters last week as second waves of infections in European countries raised fears that a new cycle of lockdowns could result in lower GDP growth. But second waves are not inevitable. They develop when clusters of cases get out of control when countries fail to implement effective public health measures, including “test and trace” policies. For example, Germany, which had one of Europe’s least draconian lockdowns, according to the Financial Times, has not had a second wave.
The country, which also “left lockdown quicker than its neighbours”, hired thousands of “pen and paper” contact tracers. “We managed to quickly recognise all the chains of infection and interrupt them. And that meant we were able to stop it spreading all over the country,” the country’s health minister told the Financial Times. There is no reason for SA to have another lockdown. If there is a second wave, it will be a sure sign that the government has again failed to implement effective public health measures.
• Gqubule is founding director at the Centre for Economic Development and Transformation.
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