What ‘normal’ are you yearning to return to?

The way national Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize has had to publicly defend government decisions around the Covid-19 pandemic, one would be excused for thinking the initial decision to put the country on lockdown had no scientific basis at all.

It is as if there were doubts about how deadly Covid-19 really is, as if there were no grim pictures of gory deaths from places like Italy and France that made the decision to go on lockdown a very sensible one. The truth is this pandemic is only a couple of months old and any decision made will always be experimental.

But the voices agitating for an abrupt end to the lockdown seem so certain of how right their position is, as if, unlike the rest of SA, they’ve been down this road before and are certain of the outcome of what they are calling for.

Social distancing as a response to a pandemic is not being implemented for the first time. It was the method of choice for a majority of United States cities against the Spanish flu pandemic in the last century. There is demonstrable documented evidence that cities and towns that took up social distancing too late suffered the worst fatalities in the pandemic as opposed to cities that implemented it way earlier.

But a more important lesson for countries like South Africa that did the first step quite well is that an equally bad move would be the relaxation of social distancing measures way too early and too abruptly.

Those cities that made that mistake experienced a second wave of deadly infections and even a third wave in certain cases.

Would this happen in SA if the lockdown was lifted now? There is no way of telling.

Calls by organisations like Business 4 South Africa that the country must go straight to level 2 with the least restrictions on social distancing might sound very noble right now. After all, there are two competing alternatives right now: a dying economy and possible mass deaths resulting from the pandemic.

It is easy to make the decision in favour of the economy because it is so logical. The results of a shrinking economy are there for all to see. It’s also very easy to conclude that this lockdown was one major hoax because the one thing that would make people take decisions in favour of saving lives is a huge surge in fatalities, which defeats the whole purpose of a lockdown.

There is a false nostalgia that has people yearning for a “return to normal economic activity” as if SA was doing well before the pandemic.

Some reality checks: the national airline was going bust, unemployment was at an all-time high, the state capture commission was confirming that SA had indeed been looted, and, yes, murder, gender-based violence and all manner of crimes were part of that “normal” that the shrill voices are screaming for a return to.

This is not to say the country must go back to that reality. The reality must not be romanticised to such an extent that a possible wiping out of a section of the population is seen as a suitable sacrifice for a return to normal.

The government has not always crowned itself in glory with regards to its handling of the lockdown. There is a lot of uncertainty that comes with the easing of the lockdown restrictions, but that must not mean all sense of reason must be abandoned.

Sydney Majoko.

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