DUMA GQUBULE: SA relies on lockdown and austerity, with nothing to show for it

While Europeans have been watching live football in 11 cities at packed stadiums in some venues, with many people not wearing masks, South Africans have been witnessing a terrifying third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the epicentre of which is Gauteng.

A few minutes after the Holland-Czech Republic game in Budapest, which had a near capacity crowd of 53,000, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a new lockdown that will have a devastating effect on an economy that was already expected to have a GDP growth rate in 2021 far below the expected world average of 5.6%, according to the World Bank.

There were no measures to provide economic relief to millions of people who will  be affected by the latest lockdown, which is likely to be extended beyond 14 days. So soon after brutal power blackouts and water outages in the middle of winter — “Mr President, we can’t be in the dark and dirty,” someone said on Twitter — it will be a grim month for all South Africans. Many will not recover from this new setback after 15 months of varying levels of lockdown.

The announcement came only a few days after Ramaphosa’s latest stop, at the port of Cape Town, in a roadshow to announce new structural reforms, which will not deal with any of the country’s immediate economic and humanitarian crises. As economist Ilan Strauss once said: “Talking of structural reforms in the middle of a depression is like telling an ICU patient who needs a life-saving intervention about the need to exercise and have a healthy diet.”

The lockdown and planned austerity measures of R265bn over the next three years will impede economic recovery. There can be no sustainable recovery without getting the pandemic under control. But, after seven years of no growth in real per capita spending the 2021 budget announced cuts of R50.3bn to the health allocation over the next three years — in the middle of a pandemic. This was the largest cut of any government department.

SA provides proof that there is no relationship between the severity of a lockdown and success in bringing the pandemic under control. We had one of the most stringent lockdowns in the world, but have nothing to show for it. SA has had 1.9-million infections, the 19th highest in the world, and 59,900 official deaths, the 16th highest in the world. According to the SA Medical Research Council, there had been 173,132 excess deaths by June 19.

You cannot have a pandemic response that has only one policy instrument — a lockdown. The government and its medical advisory council have inexplicably refused to consider other options that informed the successful responses to the pandemic in East Asia and elsewhere. There was no investment in employing and training community health workers or capacity to conduct the epidemiological detective work that is required to investigate cases and clusters. There was no investment in contact tracing or rapid testing, especially in workplaces.

South Korea’s Central Disease Control Headquarters has detailed live analysis with statistics on cluster outbreaks, including the percentage of cases that have been contacted and the number of people who have been released from quarantine. As a result, South Korea, with a population of 51.7-million people, has had only 156,000 cases and a little  more than 2,000 deaths. European countries such as Germany, Austria and Slovakia have rolled out mass weekly testing of the population. In Slovakia there was a 58% drop in the prevalence of Covid-19 after a week. Mass testing will fade out when a critical mass of the population is vaccinated.

But SA put all its eggs in the vaccination basket when it was obvious that it could not achieve herd immunity during 2021. It should have implemented complementary measures to contain the pandemic while it rolled out the vaccination programme. If nothing changes, there will be a fifth wave in June 2022.

• Gqubule is founding director at the Centre for Economic Development and Transformation.