President Cyril Ramaphosa was astonished. Addressing one of those coronavirus “family meetings” where only he gets to speak — his first of the year — on Monday, he wanted us all to appreciate how well the ban on alcohol sales was working and showed us a photograph of the emergency ward at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital on New Year’s Eve. It was completely empty!
Deviating from his prepared remarks, he said the photograph demonstrated how well the alcohol ban was working and why he was justified in prolonging it, whatever the economic cost. Look at how many lives were being saved!
I understand that drunk people are difficult to deal with but wasn’t there something just plain weird about that picture? It's peak second wave and Baragwanath is the biggest hospital in Africa. Someone tweeted: “No-one fell today. Asthma cured. No-one allergic to bee stings. No burst appendix. No broken bones. No heart attacks. No placental abruptures or preemie births …”
This Twitter contributor later had to explain that she was being sarcastic. Had the president forgotten he had also imposed a strict curfew? Had he assumed that in the two days between imposing the alcohol ban and the New Year’s casualty ward photograph supposedly being taken, that the whole of Johannesburg had somehow drunk itself dry? Please. South Africans have been stocking up for months. They knew this was coming. The only folk surprised by the second wave seem to be the people in charge.
Surely the obvious answer, if there is one, is that people are perfectly capable of drinking responsibly at home and for the rules to be shaped to that purpose. Cutting off even online deliveries of alcohol leaves a critical industry in deep trouble for no conceivable economic or health benefit.
The beach bans were also extended. That same day I made a podcast for the Financial Mail with Prof Shabir Madhi, the head of vaccinology at Wits. He said beaches were the safest places to be in the country. You’re outside, and the air is moving. Sure, ban big beach events on Boxing Day and New Year, but for the rest, open them and, for goodness sake, the holidays are over! The chances of you being infected on a beach are now seriously slim.
I get that this is difficult. The health system must be protected. But lockdowns and restrictions do not make the virus go away. They merely delay infections and almost guarantee another wave. Madhi told me our official Covid-19 death total of something approaching 35,000 people might underestimate the true number by 70%. Assuming that is correct, it means the government has allowed almost 60,000 funerals to take place of 50 people each. So, at least 3-million mourners at Covid-19 funerals. Thanks. Do the superspreading arithmetic.
Like polio, this virus will only be stopped by a vaccine. And when it comes to vaccines, the only buyer is going to be the state, and it is already abundantly clear that the state has made a total mess of protecting us. Ramaphosa said on Monday the government had been negotiating with vaccine producers for six months. Really? How long does it take to buy something that is clearly for sale?
The president said he’d be transparent but he was nothing of the kind. We do at least know that from when the first case appeared in SA last March, until September when it was reconstituted, the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC), the group of scientists advising the command council, not once discussed the procurement of a vaccine. A vaccines committee was only set up in September, by which time the early production runs on the most viable vaccines had already been bought up, and not merely by wealthy countries.
Somewhere along the line I suspect some powerful ministers argued the old HIV tactic of twisting the arms of “Big Pharma” on price. But Nelson Mandela isn’t on the end of the line any more and we have been left straggling behind as a result. Ramaphosa, now possibly open even to class action for deaths that occur after, say, June, promises 40-million vaccinated citizens by the end of the year. Assuming you start on February 1, that is about 120,000 vaccinations a day.
Not with this dysfunctional government. Only the private sector could even begin to make that number plausible, and it was only roped into the effort in late December when the government finally understood what a disaster it had created. We. Have. No. Vaccine. And the government is solely to blame.
Yes, we all need to do what we can, but The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde could have been talking about SA in that fine newspaper this week when she wrote that “The scale of what is happening now is not the fault of individuals; it is the fault of a government which appeared to learn absolutely nothing from the first wave of the virus and has gone on to repeat almost every error in the second, predictably more dangerous, wave … The level of deaths we are seeing is a result of what the government was doing several weeks ago, not what your neighbour was or wasn’t doing yesterday.”
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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