Second year of the Covid-19 lockdown
JOBURG – July unrest the most chaotic time of the Covid-19 lockdown.
South Africa is in a much better place in its second year of the pandemic.
March 26, 2022, will mark the second anniversary of the Covid-19 lockdown which has been one of the most turbulent, eye-opening, worrying times we have faced as a nation. Andile Dlodlo, Caxton Local Media journalist has covered the pandemic since day one of the lockdowns in 2020 and experienced and witnessed the highs and lows of it.
He said, “The second year of the lockdown was one of hope of returning to normal. People still faced hardships caused by it but we found ourselves looking towards a positive future as compared to the first.”
The biggest change of the second year of the pandemic was the matter of vaccines. Throughout 2020 the world yearned for a medical solution to the virus and, on May 17, 2021, those over the age of 60 in the general public were eligible for their vaccine dose.
Next in line were essential workers, such as teachers, who started getting their jabs on June 23 followed by law enforcement workers and the rest of the public. Towards the end of the year, people started to contest the effectiveness, purpose and effects of the vaccine and held various protests rejecting any mandates of them.
In 2022, some of these rejections of the vaccine mandates by private institutions even reached courts of law to battle whether the mandate was constitutionally valid.
The second year of the lockdown also saw a change in the government’s approach to handling the pandemic. In the first year, people were barred from buying rotisserie chicken and cigarettes while also not being allowed to leave the province they were in. People and businesses fought tooth and nail contesting how the government ruled on what was and wasn’t allowed and the changes came, slowly but surely.
Dlodlo said, “I’m sure we all remember seeing queues outside of liquor stores on Thursday afternoons before the ban kicked in once again. The fear people had every time the president had an announcement to make in relation to the pandemic.”
The changes in this, plus how many people could meet in indoor and outdoor spaces, was a welcome change for the tourism industry. The summer of 2021 had people enjoying themselves in different provinces and establishments for the first time since the lockdown started. It was also the time people got to see how Covid-19 affected tourism-related businesses as many of them had shut down and let go of their workers.
The lows point of the second year of the lockdown was the July unrest. A wave of chaos, violence and criminality gripped Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal forcing the army to leave their barracks to maintain the law and order that the police seemingly failed to.
Many things were attributed as the cause of the unrest such as the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma but it is undeniable that the poverty, hunger and lack of opportunities and support faced by South Africans had a very big hand in things.
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