Unpopular booze ban seems to make a difference

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the image from the Baragwanath Hospital emergency room on New Year’s Day spoke volumes. It was echoingly empty.

Normally, this period is one of its busiest, with beds full and even floors overflowing with victims of violent incidents. Some have been stabbed, or shot; others have been mangled in car wrecks. What most of the cases have in common is that alcohol – or more correctly alcohol abuse – played a role in sending a person to hospital in a life-threatening condition.

Many complained about the government’s most recent tightening of the Covid-19 regulations, which had the dual purpose of trying to slow the spread of the disease through a particularly infectious new variant of the coronavirus – and to keep hospitals as free as possible of “unnecessary” emergency and trauma cases. And that is the reality: violence – whether through assault or reckless behaviour on our roads – is a direct result of the abuse of booze.

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The empty trauma units – not only at Baragwanath but also at a number of hospitals around the country – showed, at least, that the government was correct in its assertion that alcohol abuse fills up our hospitals. While some Covid-19 denialists tried to use the empty beds as “proof” of the government’s “lies” about the disease, the point they missed was that the dramatic decline in trauma admissions also lessened the load on overworked medical personnel.

While there have been many valid grumbles about the many being punished for the “sins” of the few, it is plain that South Africans do not respond – for reasons of bloody-mindedness, “independence”, or ignorance – to appeals to do the right thing.

Sometimes we need harsh rules, not to restrict the many, but to protect them from the recklessness of the few.

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