Until you or someone close to you gets it, the Covid-19 pandemic is becoming a bit theatrical. It’s clear that as the number of cases rises in SA (we now lead the world in the percentage growth of new cases) things have run out of control. People are blaming alcohol, exhaustion or a lack of care. But even though our numbers look bad (as of Monday night we had 73,533 cases in all and just over 39,867 recoveries) the fact is that the virus is behaving here almost exactly the way the scientists said it would.
You can be clever and ask whether the government used the time it bought by locking down early wisely, but there’s no right answer. The fact is, we’re in the surge. This is what it looks like. There is apparently some evidence of slowing growth already in the Western Cape as numbers rise in the Eastern Cape, a basket case at the best of times, and in Gauteng, from where I’m sure I heard some gloating about the DA-led Western Cape falling apart just a few weeks ago.
This virus will make fools of all of us, as it has already in much better-equipped societies than ours. It is all very well to bow before the sparkling prime minister of New Zealand and applaud the disappearance of the virus from the islands, but when will anyone ever be able to leave there again? Let alone visit without quarantine?
I think the government here has done about as well as it could. Of course it has been crazy. We wailed at wild shopping rules but all they were trying to do was to give people as few excuses to go out shopping as possible. It just came out wrong. But once this thing is in the community there’s not much to be done about it.
The scientists said before the end of April that the lockdown had served its purpose and delayed the surge. That was all that could be done. Everything else was and remains politics. Even now they reckon the government’s plodding away with mass testing is just a waste of time. So what if we’ve done a million tests? We still don’t know how many cases there are. Not even nearly. And the tests are coming back so late the results just don’t matter other than to the person who may turn out to have been negative or positive at the time of the test a week or two ago.
I’m not sure why it is still news that the scientists insist the testing is useless, other than for health workers and perhaps the aged, but it seems to be.
The truth may be that we are not nearly grateful enough that we did lock down when we did. It turns out President Cyril Ramaphosa’s timing may have been inspired.
The architect of the UK lockdown, Neil Ferguson – though he might have had an affair during it – is still an intellect to be reckoned with. He says the UK would have had half the deaths it has had, had it locked down a week earlier and not dithered.
We did lock down early and it still makes sense. The fact that we seem now to be lifting restrictions as the surge reaches some kind of peak is neither here nor there, though a lot will now depend on how good the health services are. We know there’s not much to be done about that except the usual. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Wear a mask and, if you can, stay at home. How hard can all or some of that be for a lot of us?
Needless to say, Ramaphosa is now being blamed for the rise in cases since we went to level 3 lockdown at the beginning of June, despite the fact that this is exactly what the science said would happen. A poll says he is less popular now than he was at level 4 and people want the booze ban back!
But as the virus spreads its way around the world and does whatever it wants, some people get really sick and others go quietly mad. How else do you explain the row around advice commissioned by the World Health Organisation (let’s face it, not the most dynamic organisation in the world but its heart is in the right place) that the right social distance might be 1m not 2m. Or something like that. A study recommending this says reducing social distance from 2m to 1m would increase your chances of infection from 1.3% to 2.6%, a statistical nothing.
Or so you would think. But The Guardian is a British newspaper and they can be as dotty as we can. “A doubling of risk from 1.3% to 2.6% is hardly marginal,” huffed someone on Twitter. He may be right. Isn’t that, like, double, or a 100% increase in risk? “The logical conclusion of your argument re absolute risk,” he said, “is that there should be no social distancing. Assuming that’s not what you are advocating. When you are deciding between two interventions, relative risk is important.”
And so on … The good news is that the government, having got itself out of the lockdown corner it painted itself and the rest of us into, is not going back. If people can’t look after themselves, can’t keep away from crowds, then tough, and I think that’s about right. We could have an enhanced level 3 in a matter of days.
Bring it on. Why should hairdressers and restaurant owners and staff suffer while banks and retail chains and wine farms get on with life? We might as well. I would forbid crowds (the 50 people in a church or a funeral is stupid and dangerous) and hope for the best while planning, now, for the next wave of the virus and the one or two after that. There’s no guarantee there’s a vaccine coming and in the absence of one the only thing we have in the long term is herd immunity, which means about 60% of us need to get infected.
Consider that the US population is 330.9-million and that only 2.2-million people there have been infected (the highest number in any country by far), that is still less than 1% of the population. The thing is to plan ahead. Pakistan is beginning to experiment with more flexible lockdowns.
And if that doesn’t work then maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. I loved this illustration of the damage done to US Navy aircraft during World War 2. Researchers assumed the enemy was targeting the areas shown by hits (the red dots) but, obviously, these were aircraft that had returned to base. They were forgetting to ask why the ones that didn’t make it, um, didn’t.
The most common-sense interview I’ve seen on the virus in a while was sent to me by a friend on WhatsApp. The advice is that your level of threat depends on how long you spend in the presence of someone infected and how much viral load you get at the moment of infection. Time and load. Time and load. That speaks to me. I don’t know about Blue Zones but Michael Osterholm sounds like he has his head screwed on right.
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