Use unpopular Covid lessons

The news that the trauma unit at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital received no patients on New Year’s Eve for the
first time during a festive season is to be welcomed.

It is no secret that SA’s transition into a new year is always accompanied by violence and death.

It is obvious the combination of the 9pm to 6am curfew and the temporary ban on the sale of alcohol helped to achieve this extraordinary feat in the hospital that services Soweto, possibly the country’s largest township.

One of the aims of the president’s announcing of the adjusted Level 3 lockdown status obviously bore instant results in hospitals like Chris Hani Baragwanath.

The zero admissions to the trauma unit means no ICU beds were taken up unnecessarily and that would ensure that Covid-19 patients were not disadvantaged by injured festive season revellers.

The president’s other reasons, reducing super-spreader events had been achieved, too. It would seem Ramaphosa’s emotional speech is well on its way to achieving its intended purpose.

It would also seem the unnecessary war talk by the Minister of Police Bheki Cele has been toned down a notch.

While Cele and the police force must not claim easy victories in the crime statistics realm, SA will have let a good crisis go to waste if no lessons are taken from how effective a simple curfew has been in aiding law enforcement.

This pandemic has wreaked havoc in all areas of life, so whatever silver lining presents must be grabbed with both hands.

Right now would be the time to look ahead to future festive periods and to explore the implementation of a curfew and other measures to reduce injuries and fatalities in hotspots like Hillbrow.

The other important lesson that must be learned with the pandemic is the need for swiftness and being proactive in dealing with it.

At the end of November, with the country on Level 1, daily infections were hovering around the 3 000 mark.

SA’s risk-adjusted strategy was working (somewhat). But the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) and everyone in the country knew that the festive season was just two weeks away.

It is also known that South Africa is still heavily reliant on the migrant labour system: people live in the urban areas for work and migrate to their home provinces in December.

The movement of the virus was inevitable. Add end-of year events to that mix and the current situation the country is in makes sense.

It would have been sad and unpopular for people’s movement to be restricted between provinces over the festive season but the war against Covid-19 is not a popularity contest.

Unpopular decisions need to be taken in good time for them to be effective.

The risk-adjusted strategy that the Cabinet adopted, based on scientific research, was never popular in the first place, but it achieved its goal: it slowed down the spread of the virus.

Shotgun measures to fix lack of foresight on the part of government leadership will only fix matters temporarily but at the end of it all, if the big migration of workers between provinces is not factored into decision-making, numbers will continue to spike.

The economy cannot be shut down forever and the vaccine is not arriving tomorrow.

The NCCC and the Cabinet better be working on a new strategy to arrest the spread because the current situation cannot be sustained for much longer: people will move and so will the virus.

Sydney Majoko.

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