On May 7 the second wave of the coronavirus peaked in India, at a count of 389,672 cases on the day — most likely an undercount — driven by a frightening new variant of the virus, now dubbed “Delta”. The vast suffering in India, accompanied by the despair and colour only India can supply, is unforgettable. The world watched in horror as people died searching their cities for oxygen.
Between the start of the second wave on February 11 and the May 7 peak in new cases, nearly 90,000 Indians perished. On that May 7 SA recorded 1,630 new cases. On May 15 new cases were 341,142 in India and 2,645 in SA. On June 1 new cases were 164,291 in India and 4,483 in SA.
On Sunday, June 20, India’s new cases had dropped to 60,687. Ours had soared to 10,891. That day Prof Barry Schoub, head of the ministerial advisory committee on vaccines, was interviewed on eNCA by the careful Omar Essack. He asked: “Is the Delta variant, which is supposed to be 60% more transmissible, in SA right now, and is it a variant of concern?”
“So far it’s been fairly well contained,” said Schoub reassuringly, “It’s been people that have travelled into SA. Of the [indistinguishable] which has been genotyped close on 99% have been b.351, the Beta variant. So far neither the Alpha variant (UK) nor the Delta variant have spread extensively.”
Phew, well, relax folks. Except that Prof Schoub, who brushes away all criticism of SA dumping 1-million AstraZeneca doses as “unscientific”, could not have been more wrong. As he was speaking the Delta variant was already dominant in SA. He just hadn’t looked hard enough for it.
Dr Richard Lessells, one of a team in KwaZulu-Natal that tracks the genomes of the virus and first identified the Beta variant, admits the establishment got Delta wildly wrong. “While we were seeing some of the Delta,” News24 reports him saying, “we thought it would not take over infections. We clearly got that wrong and of course we need more data to understand what is happening.”
A sanctimonious and faintly unctuous navel-gazing has characterised the “science” that advisers have been giving the government ever since last September, when Zweli Mkhize had five leading scientists removed from the Covid ministerial advisory committee.
They included the Wits dean of medicine, Prof Shabir Madhi, the CEO of the SA Medical Research Council, Prof Glenda Gray, Prof Francois Venter, head of the Ezintsha health unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Dr Angelique Coetzee, chair of the SA Medical Association. How about that? Just gone. More likely than not for in some way irritating the minister.
Yet they were merely doing their jobs properly. What was worse, Mkhize lied about their sacking. His people concocted a story about needing more “behavioural” expertise as the pandemic changed shape. Our situation today shows what a cock and bull story that was. The fact is these people were capable of giving Mkhize (and President Cyril Ramaphosa) nuanced and intuitive advice that is simply not available to Ramaphosa now.
Just a week after The Great Delta Complacency with Essack on eNCA, Ramaphosa was on our televisions raising lockdown to level 4 and warning of dire consequences to come because of Delta. He said he had found out about how Delta had overtaken, positively flattened, Beta just two days earlier.
The acting health minister wailed something on Tuesday about there still being enough Beta variant around for our vaccines to be effective against, but she is clutching at straws. Delta is everywhere.
Ramaphosa is in trouble again because the right people have been sidelined and the advice he’s getting is poor. Anyone with a TV and an imagination could have seen what was happening in India. Anyone with a friend in Gauteng would have heard how freezing cold it became in late May and early June. Did the official Covid advisers or senior people in the presidency perhaps think everyone was outside playing hopscotch?
No, they were inside, huddling against the bitter cold and transmitting a furiously infectious Delta variant to each other.
“It’s been fairly well contained,” says The Complacency. For crying out loud. Enough with the one-dimensional, stay-in-your-lane, counsel from the health department. If the president still believes a word he hears from that department he will come unstuck again soon.
Ramaphosa needs to get some agile minds into a Covid team that directly advises his own office, Madhi and Gray among them. They’ll tell him what to order now for the fourth wave in October and November. Enough with surprises. The Complacency will wait forever and then run a few genotypes and wait until the Thursday meeting to present their results in the right format.
And the short answer to the what-to-order question is “everything but the Chinese and Russian vaccines”, which seem pretty hopeless. Ordinary Russians are avoiding “their” vaccine and countries that have relied on Chinese vaccines litter the current top 10 wave peaks. AstraZeneca, by the way, seems to work just fine against our new dominant variant and there’s a lot of AZ stock around. We should know.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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