Could those infected with Covid-19 be banned from partying?

Did you have a good weekend? You did? That’s nice.

So did a lot of Covid-19 infected people, many knowing they were infected.

What would you expect if you got infected as a result? Should they have stayed home? Should you have? Perhaps you’re at fault for putting yourself at risk? How about the risk of the people who work and live with you?

Trust South Africans to show innovation when a law doesn’t suit them. Fortunately, we’ve moved from drinking wine from teapots, and the empty bottle of zero alcohol beer disguising what’s really in the glass. However, under these new regulations, bars and nightclubs have suddenly turned into “restaurants” overnight.

Why? Restaurants apparently don’t have a pesky 50 person upper limit, so as a bar owner, you’d obviously start selling burgers, call yourself a restaurant, and push as much trade as possible. No surprises there.

Equally unsurprising is the lack of enforcement reported over the weekend. There are only so many cops to go around, I guess.

So, it appears it’s up to us. Leaving people to their own devices during a pandemic seems like asking for trouble, which is why this guided approach is probably preferable with some limitations still in place.

However, as the government is at pains to repeat, just because you may do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Ha! As if they expected South Africans to stay home and be good little angels after five months of being grounded and effectively sent to our rooms.

So here’s the scenario I fear: I go to a pub at around 19h00 on Friday and sit at a table an infected person was at 30 minutes prior. The waitron, spinning because everybody is summoning them but the establishment can’t maintain a full staff contingent, misses a spot sanitising the table in their haste, between the previous patrons and I. I’d likely get infected as I remove my mask to sip on the carbs my body has so missed.

Sure, that’s a risk and one I’ll have to take, but risk is measured. You don’t expect a person who knows they’re infected to go out, do you? Do you?!

With nothing stopping them, it sounds like you should. If I caught it like that and passed it on to somebody more vulnerable, I wouldn’t be too happy about it, but is that enough to make it a crime to go out with Covid-19?

Links have been drawn to knowingly putting others at risk for another virus – HIV.

There have been successful convictions on that front for attempted murder, but there are a few issues with the correlation to Covid-19 infections.

For a start, unless you maintain the promiscuity of a rabbit lost in the Playboy mansion, you’re far more likely to be able to trace the source of an HIV infection, as its transmission happens in rather specific circumstances. By contrast, contracting Covid-19 would be near impossible to trace to a legal certainty if you’ve spent a few hours in a place that houses 49 other people – probably more – at a time.

The other issue is the stigmatisation element, which also comes with HIV, and we have much research indicating that people are less likely to volunteer for testing and seek assistance if there’s a stigma to it. This is a difficult element to counter because we already do have a culture of “better I don’t know then I can’t be at fault.”

In this instance, the stigmatisation on the subject of HIV may be enough to counter the criminalising of the spread of HIV, but in the analogy to Covid-19, we wouldn’t be criminalising the spread of HIV, we’d be criminalising having sex – (ie, making it a crime to be in public when knowingly infected with the virus).

To bring it back to Covid, infected persons should be banned from public spaces and the stigmatisation shouldn’t be an issue. We know under the State of Disaster, government can order people to get tested pretty easily and better yet, we know they can trace people pretty easily, so why is it not an offence if we’re talking about stopping the spread of a pandemic?

The only probable reason I could consider is that people who live alone, if infected, may not be able to get essentials to which I figure, compelling good neighbours to help would be an easy and great solution to that, or simply put some of that R500 billion to work.

But more importantly, R500 billion and five months locked down to fight a pandemic but now all of a sudden, little stops those infected from risking others…I dunno.

Sounds pretty silly. I guess the next few weeks’ statistics will be somewhat telling.

Richard Anthony Chemaly entertainment attorney, radio broadcaster and lecturer of communication ethics.

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