Lockdown level 1: Now is the time to proceed with extreme caution

The decision by Cabinet and the National Coronavirus Command Council to take the country back to lockdown level 1 must be treated with extreme caution.

Level 1 practically means the country moves back to the way things were before the pandemic, with the few exceptions of closed nightclubs and the curfew.

This might mean very few changes to the way people have been conducting their daily lives during the pandemic because, as some commentators have pointed out, most people have been living on level 1 even without the official announcement. Why the need for caution?

President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged right at the beginning of the lockdown levels system that the pandemic had pitted the economy against the need to save lives.

“This is a fight to save every life…” he said when he announced the second liquor ban on 11 July, 2020. This was when the disruption to normal life was at its highest, with the first pandemic wave giving way to a second wave that was to cause even more havoc, anxiety and death, peaking as late as December, a mere two months ago.

One of this pandemic’s greatest “tricks” is its ability to give people a warped sense of time.

Many South Africans whose businesses have been hit the hardest by the pandemic have lived a stop-start life for the past year.

Business owners with interests in tourist establishments, restaurants, hotels and the liquor industry have all  experienced the fear and anxiety that comes with not knowing whether their businesses will survive.

Even a cursory glance across mall rental spaces reveals that many of the affected businesses will never open again.

Movie theatres and even well-established bus services, like Greyhound, have fallen prey to this pandemic in less than a year.

Extreme caution is necessary because if there’s one lesson that can be taken from having an extremely high daily infection rate of up to 21 000 in December to a “low” of below 2 000 in February, it is that until the vaccination drive has reached its intended herd immunity level the disruption to life that has been the biggest feature of the past year still looms large.

To go down from adjusted level 3 straight to level 1 creates two things: it gives a false sense of hope that normality is just around the corner and also helps entrench the mentality that “because the president says the country is open, it must be safe out there”.

This pandemic-battered economy obviously cannot take any more disruptions and the vaccine gives hope, but even the most optimistic know that herd immunity can only be achieved months from now.

And what happens when a new wave comes along before then, or a new variant presents itself? The obvious answer is that a swift reversal of levels towards harder lockdown will become necessary.

But the scariest and most worrying thing for Cabinet and the command council would be the damage to the psyche of the population, especially businesses that will have spent money to revive, following the latest relaxation of levels.

There is no obvious solution to balancing economic activity with the need to save lives, but it would have been more prudent to link the relaxation in the levels with the country’s proximity towards achieving herd immunity, should  no new variants come along.

When the president announced the end of the hard lockdown in May, 2020, he invoked the phrase: “It’s in your hands, South Africa.” That phrase applies more now than ever.

Sydney Majoko.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.