Ongoing unrest will fuel another Covid infection spike

With lockdown restrictions being extended by a further two weeks due to a spike in Covid infections, the ongoing riots won’t be doing South Africa any favours and is likely to be a massive driver of increased infections.

Experts say despite the current vaccination programme, the biggest driver of infections is gatherings and the protests in several parts of the country are no different than any other mass gathering.

Lockdown level 4 was extended by two weeks by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday, following a surge in infections and the country recording an average of 20,000 daily new infections. The country has over 200,000 active Covid cases and around 4,200 deaths were recorded in just the last two weeks.

Adding fuel to the Covid fire

And while Ramaphosa made the concession of opening restaurants and gyms during the 14-day extension, it is instead the current riots, unrest, and looting happening in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng which will lead to an increase in the number of infections, said South African Medical Association (SAMA) chairperson Dr Angelique Coetzee.

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“That is a much bigger problem than to restrict restaurants and restrict gyms. At least those people are listening. But these riots will for sure lead to an increase in infections and a lot of the [rioters] are not on medical schemes, so they will end up at the public hospitals. That is a much bigger problem than your restaurants,” said Coetzee.

It also seemed Gauteng was already at its peak of the third wave, accounting for more than half of the country’s infections in recent weeks, and this meant infections in the province were expected to decline in the next week or two, said head of the biometric sciences department at Cape Peninsula University Professor Glenda Davison.

Due to the time lag between being infected and being admitted to hospital, hospital admission and the death rate could, however, continue to be high, she said.

“In other provinces such as KZN and Western Cape, the infections will probably rise as they are behind Gauteng. The biggest driver is large gatherings and if restaurants and gyms obey the Covid protocols then they should not be major spreaders,” said Davison.

Fourth wave of infections inevitable

Despite the vaccination programme being implemented, a fourth wave of infections is, however, inevitable as the Covid jab does not prevent infection but only severe illness, explained Coetzee.

“We will not be able to prevent a fourth wave. We are vaccinating to prevent severe disease and hospitalisation, and the consequence of death. We are not vaccinating to get people out of mild or moderate disease. They will be there in December when the fourth wave starts. Vaccinating is to prevent death and people ending up in hospital,” she said.

And while the pace of the vaccine roll out remained extremely slow, with 4 236 718 people currently having received the Covid jab, at least 60% of the population should be vaccinated by the time the fourth wave hits in the summer months, Davison predicted.

“In order to achieve this, we will need to be vaccinating over 200 000 people per day. I believe we can do this if we have supply.”

Another mutation not out of the question

In the meantime, the virus could also mutate yet again, and become something even more sinister than the delta variant which has quickly become the dominant variant spreading throughout the country. This, however, does not guarantee the possible new strain would give the virus an advantage as trends have shown that mutations don’t make the virus more dangerous, said Davison.

“Some mutations don’t give it any advantage and some give it the ability to be more transmissible. It is these that become dominant. The trend seems to indicate that they don’t become more dangerous, but as long as the virus can spread and divide, it will give rise to mutations and possibly new variants. Until the whole world achieves herd immunity, we will always be vulnerable to new variants,” she said.

rorisangk@citizen.co.za