Cyril playing at viral secrets is not helping any of us

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address to the nation was uninspiring. Looking tired and dispirited, he made only two noteworthy points.

The first was that the lockdown would be selectively relaxed by the end of May. The second was that the government had failed to meet expectations.

That’s a courageous admission.

It’s a pity, then, that Ramaphosa immediately reverted to dissimulating politician mode. Every next government move, he assured us, would continue to be informed by “best available evidence” and by medical expertise.

We must presumably accept all this on presidential say-so, because the government’s natural inclination towards secrecy and control – after a refreshing initial openness over Covid-19 – has been reasserting itself.

Take the mathematical modelling of Covid-19. The assumptions on which the model is based are being kept secret, even from medical scientists not in the inner circle.

And then there is the data itself. Government statistics are publicly available according to the number of tests, cases diagnosed, recoveries and deaths. One can further slice them according to age, gender and province.

But there is one obvious omission: race. That is a stunning anomaly in a country where every official statistic is based on racial categories.

This might be to avoid stigmatisation, and there’s some merit in the argument. We have a history, after all, where HIV was once dismissed as undeserving of serious attention because it was a “moffie disease”.

But one must see the government’s sudden racial sensitivity for what it is. It’s a mistake, foolish and self-defeating.

Withholding information is the government’s default setting. That explains why the government would not release the details of its mathematical modelling of the pandemic.

According to a presidency spokesperson last week, the secrecy was to avoid “panic and stigma”.

Complex societies work best when lubricated with the best information available.

Democracies, likewise, depend on governments allowing a free flow of information and opinion.

Even with the best of intentions, secrecy can be gravely damaging, including to those it ostensibly is protecting.

That is potentially the case with ignoring a race factor in infections. In the US and UK, where the ethnicity of Covid-19 victims is recorded and made publicly available, it has been discovered that African-Americans and people of so-called British Asian and Minority Ethnic origin are overrepresented in the infection and mortality figures.

There is now a vigorous debate as to why, and what, if anything, can be done about it.

It is also forcing a discussion on the degree to which there might be a genetic predisposition among an ethnic group to disease.

Or, more cheerfully for Africa, a resistance. A month ago, the World Health Organisation warned that Africa would have 300,000 Covid deaths this year. This week it said 190,000.

South African actuaries have cut that to a maximum of 88,000 deaths.

There is nothing sinister in any of these wildly differing estimates. They are based on best knowledge at the moment.

But best knowledge is publicly accessible knowledge. Explain to us the scientific parameters of your projections. And also lay out the logical parameters of your shopping restrictions.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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