PETER BRUCE: Covid round two. I’ll wear a mask but the gloves are off

So, apparently, the coronavirus is coming back, in a second wave, to finish us off. No less a leader than the premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Sihle Zikalala, thinks so. It’s a hell of a thing. Even the minister of health, Zweli Mkhize, himself stricken with the virus just recently, warns that infections are rising again and he has vaguely threatened that the Western Cape, the province that dealt most easily, calmly and efficiently with the first wave of Covid, might be the subject of some official action soon.

In SA, that means putting a province, or a district or even the whole country back onto a higher level of lockdown under the state of disaster we are still subject to. The fact that the Western Cape gets singled out is no surprise. It is the only province not run by the ruling ANC so it can be bullied. In Gauteng, where cases are also supposedly rising (it is hard to be sure whether there are more actual cases or just more being found) the premier has dared Mkhize to even think about imposing a lockdown again of any sort. My bet is that the health minister, who has ambitions for even higher office, will take the hint and back off.

But, at the same time, second waves are sweeping through Europe. Parts of Britain today look like SA did in April, with plastic sheets covering “nonessential” items in shops as Prime Minister Boris Johnson battles, often against his own instincts, to control a resurgence of Covid-19 infections. Infections are peaking in France and Spain and governments are in a state of near panic.

And even at the same time as all this, three celebrated scientists signed a declaration the other day to the effect that, actually, there is nothing really to worry about other than the effect that panic-stricken governments might have on our lives and our families.

Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist; Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modelling of infectious diseases; and Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations signed what is called the Great Barrington Declaration in early October, a sort of gospel of common sense, they believe, in a time of madness and destruction.

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration reads. “The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health — leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

“Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practised by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”

All of which is fine, obviously, until someone you know gets sick and is rushed to hospital barely able to breathe.

But that is also the crux of the dilemma we face. People we love die all the time. They get rushed to hospital all the time. They have heart attacks and strokes. They go into shock after eating peanuts and get knocked over by speeding cars.

They all get rushed to hospital, where they sometimes recover and sometimes not. People are relieved or crushed. These things happen in a country like SA perhaps 500,000 times a year. But we don’t shut down the economy for them. Nor do 2.2-million people lose their jobs because of them. Nor are we encouraged to live in fear for our own lives because of them.

But for the coronavirus, all of the above apply. Why? I’m not sure I know. It is partly because we allow decisions to be made for us. It was a small group of people who decided to impose a lockdown on the country to “combat” this invisible virus. Mainly, they were led in their decisions about what we could and could not do, and when and where, by medical advice. From doctors or scientists.

It would be nice to think that was OK but it isn’t. I’ve known some very odd, even foolish, doctors in my time. There are fools in all professions and trades, including mine. As for the science, none of these people agrees with each other so why should we believe the ones the politicians like?

The chair of the ministerial advisory committee on Covid-19, the body advising the cabinet what to do, is Prof Salim Karim. Highly regarded, he has also been all over the place during the pandemic. He started out advocating the lockdown to delay the arrival of peak Covid. After about a month he was saying the lockdown had served its purpose but by then none of the politicians was listening. He had legitimised their power play and would be largely forgotten. Now I hear him saying that while there is no second wave yet (the premier of his province disagrees) there might be. The threat is of a return to stiffer lockdowns.

But if a five-month lockdown didn’t work the first time, why would it be expected to work now?

The reason is politics. ANC politicians cannot contemplate not doing anything, even if they cannot comprehend what it is that they are doing. It would be good if finance minister Tito Mboweni slashes spending in his medium-term budget policy statement on Wednesday because that might vaguely bring it home to the ANC what damage its lockdown did.

President Cyril Ramaphosa was angrily insistent in parliament the other day that his economic recovery programme was a necessary response to the pandemic. Opposition parties mocked that, saying the ANC had done terminal damage to the country before Covid. But let’s at least all agree that the measure taken to counter Covid, the lockdown, created an economic disaster.

Why would the premier of an important province threaten to do it all again? Perhaps Mr Zikalala is not entirely present.

He won’t, but what Ramaphosa should do now, immediately, is declare that under no circumstances will this country lock down for this virus again. If he wants to get the economy moving again he needs to give it some confidence, not allow his lieutenants to play games with businesses and investors.

Meanwhile, as the recently unemployed will appreciate, there is a direct correlation between not having a job and starving, in case anyone was wondering. Relief has been extended for three months but after that there is only a vague promise of “job opportunities” as the road maintenance programme passes (or, more likely, doesn’t pass) near your house.

Needless to say, the debate about lockdowns has polarised SA. Broadly, the political Left is sympathetic and the Right is not. At least that is how it is seen. For myself, ahead of a second wave, I want to better understand where to stand. There’s a great Leonard Cohen song (they’re all great) called The Captain, where the master and a final crew member say goodbye ...

“Complain, complain, that’s all you’ve done

Ever since we lost

If it’s not the Crucifixion

Then it’s the Holocaust.”

“May Christ have mercy on your soul

For making such a joke

Amid these hearts that burn like coal

And the flesh that rose like smoke.”

“I know that you have suffered, lad,

But suffer this awhile:

Whatever makes a soldier sad

Will make a killer smile.”

“I’m leaving, Captain, I must go

There’s blood upon your hand

But tell me, Captain, if you know

Of a decent place to stand.”

“There is no decent place to stand

In a massacre;

But if a woman take your hand

Go and stand with her.”

Leonard was always a sucker for love. But standing in the right place in this Covid intellectual battlefield is not easy. You criticise lockdown and you’re a cold fascist. You back lockdown and you’re a useless weakling. But I am beginning to find my place.

Here, for instance is an exchange that helps. It starts with a tweet from an eminent doctor in New York, Tom Frieden. He sits on all manner of boards and does good works. Early this week he tweeted: “We’re not going back to a pre-Covid world anytime soon. The quicker we accept that, the more we can reduce deaths and economic disruption.”

That was met by an answer from the man I have most relied on for answers about where to stand, Prof Francois Balloux, head of the University College London genetics institute and a scientist of rare humanity. Follow him on Twitter if you can, you won’t regret it @BallouxFrancois.

“It is completely beyond me,” Balloux wrote to Frieden, “how anyone could think that spreading despair and hopelessness may be a helpful public health strategy. Also, some sense of history and context may help. Ever heard of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ that followed the 1918/1920 pandemic that killed 50m-100m?”

Exactly, I thought. The Spanish flu killed more than 50-million people at the end of World War 1. Covid has killed 1.16-million. The Roaring Twenties were how humans responded back then and yet when we see pictures of kids at so-called “super-spreader” events in nightclubs today we are angry and judgmental.

But they are just having a good time. Some of them may contract the virus but it won’t kill them and they are not necessarily going to infect a lot of other people either. It may well be that the rise in cases we think we see now is a simple result of our arrival at level 1 lockdown earlier this month.

I don’t want to stop people living their lives. I wouldn’t go to a nightclub anyway, it’s not my thing, but people who do must know what they are doing? No? They don’t?

I love that here it’s the Right that wants the lockdown lifted but in Sweden it’s the Right that wants it imposed. That’s the Swedish model for you. Somehow just better.

So I’ve found a place to stand now. Zikalala helped no end. No matter how high the new cases may spread, I will oppose another lockdown with everything I have. 

If the president thinks he is going to get his recovery going in anything other than a completely free country he needs to think again. He and his scientists overreacted once and people are not going to bet on him or his cabinet again.

The fact is, we’ve been lied to, by the government and the scientists who have advised it. Hospitals were never overrun. Those field hospitals everyone built were never more than 5% occupied during the first wave. And the much-heralded deal where private hospitals would take the huge spillover from wrecked public hospitals as Covid patients flooded in? Absolute rubbish. In the entire lockdown in 2020, between them, Netcare, Life and Mediclinic, the country’s major private hospital groups, were asked to take fewer than 20 public patients. 20! And Mediclinic’s share of that was a round 0. The hospitals were fine.

And while this charade was going on, public and private hospitals were virtually closed to anyone not suffering from Covid-19. Elective surgeries were cancelled, meaning that cancer patients could not even have the most basic investigation, a biopsy.

Now, as lockdown enthusiasts try to count extra deaths, they assume they were mostly Covid-19 victims who somehow escaped the attentions of the authorities. We can’t have lost just 16,000 people to Covid. It must be worse than that, surely? They couldn’t possibly be the TB, HIV/Aids, cancer and other deaths we missed because we were so alarmed by the new virus we took our eye off all the other things that can kill us.

You want it not to happen here again but it already has. The regulations on travel to SA are pathetic. Tourism is the easiest export in the world. You just sit there and people bring you their hard currency. What’s not to like? Even a full planeload of infected Englishmen would not make the slightest difference to the passage of the virus in our country now. That is what community transmission does. I heard a former member of the ministerial advisory committee, Shabir Mahdi, say that just the other day.

But we will stop people coming and giving us their money so we can pay our giant debts. It’s the science, you see? How stupid are we? We will kill our future because we lack the courage to live now. It’s such a shame.