600 days of Covid lockdown: Does government even know if it was worth it?

Yup, in the next week, we’ll have met the 600-day mark in the lockdown aspect of our Covid-19 response.

Now, nobody should be simple enough to say that we never should have had a lockdown.

However, given that there are many roads to Mecca, it would be prudent to investigate which road has the best padstals along the way. Y’know, the ones with colder drinks and better biltong.

Unfortunately, 600 days in, there’s no official reflection on how this lockdown has gone. Sure, you could ask “but it’s not over so how can we reflect on it?”, but in that case, you should at least try avoid coming across as a fool.

Even if you had to append “so far” to whatever creative title of an interim lockdown report, you’d think that almost two years in, there would at least be some attempt at putting down some numbers on how it went, over and above infections and deaths.

The sweet R500 billion, for example, would make for a wonderful infographic on how it was spent and the results that came from it.

Or maybe, an estimation of how transmission was stalled by the cigarette ban would fit in nicely on page 21. Oh and speaking of 21, I wonder how seriously the government wants to take section 21 of the Disaster Management Act.

ALSO READ: The cigarette ban is still only half-smoked

Obviously we all know it, right? The one that says “…from time to time, [the National Centre must] measure performance and evaluate such progress and initiatives” in relation to disaster management plans. I haven’t seen too many of those.

Yeah, the legal system allows for these state of disasters to be declared and we’re reminded often of the need for these initiatives. It would be nice if those who did the reminding, reminded themselves of the need to give feedback.

Politicians may be preoccupied. They have been through a lot. Between an election and finding the right words to avoid conflating “De Klerk did good but…” with “I’m not a racist but…”, I’m sure that the two-hour daily quota for work gets filled relatively swiftly.

Even if I were to understand that there’s little time for reflection on shutting down entire industries for the benefit of keeping the country healthy, despite hours of time committed to some good ol’ Twitter feuds, it does worry me that we have little official reflection.

Why? 600 days in and you would expect that decisions going forward will be informed by the results of previous decisions. A kid learns to walk in less time.

Yet, still, here we are with unanswered simple questions.

ALSO READ: Did government miss its level 2 lockdown review deadline?

It’s not that difficult to take a 10-year running average of alcohol related medical accidents in each hospital and compare that to capacity and availability due to the alcohol ban.

Yes, I am aware that there are some words in there which exceed two syllables. Surely, if one in our two rugby teams’ worth of ministers took their two-hour quota for a day and spent one hour understanding how to do the research, they could spend the other hour telling their secretary to tell their deputy to tell a departmental director to tell a manager to tell an officer to tell an intern to do the research, and we may have it in the next 300 days.

I mean, we are paying them to do the work required by the law, right?

Yes, I am grumpy about this, but for good reasons.

Some of the best stories ever told are stories of events that occurred between midnight and 4am. It would be nice to know why those stories have had to be stopped. It’s not exactly like those are the five busiest hours of the day.

Sometime, it would be nice to hear why we’re still doing the lockdown things.

Not because lockdown isn’t important, but because it is. So important, in fact, that it would be grand to know what kinds of lockdown work, instead of spending the next 600 days playing guess-guess revolution.