Europe not taking the lead and solutions are not ‘white’
If we can’t all get behind the Chinese/Ethiopian way of fighting the coronavirus, can we at least agree to support the Korean/ Ethiopian method? By now, Covid-19 should have challenged the racial and national stereotypes that have held sway for decades. In a world in which competence is supposed to be the preserve of Europe and North America, East Asia has found the most effective ways of dealing with the virus. White people are often portrayed as the only “natural” leaders in a crisis, yet the chief source of information and inspiration is the World Health Organisation (WHO), led by former Ethiopian health minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
But it takes more than evidence to challenge racial thinking. The US president routinely calls the pandemic the “Chinese virus” to shift the blame for his country’s rising infection rate. Social media bigots demand Tedros’s sacking, presumably because he is guilty of being African and of telling countries to make economic sacrifices to put their people’s health first. And in this country, a singer presumably enraged by being forced to miss a public appearance has denounced the lockdown as a “white solution”.
This shows again that sounding off on social media requires no grasp of facts. Lockdowns are not a “white” solution — they are the method used by China’s authorities to deal with the outbreak. Europe and the US adopted them too late and very reluctantly. Since the Ethiopian-led WHO agrees lockdowns can help fight the virus, ours is presumably an “Ethiopian solution” too. It is also an essential strategy in a country in which millions live with compromised immune systems, even if it is not easy to implement because the gap between the way the economic “insiders” live and the experience of the rest of the citizenry is stark.
The attack on the lockdown seems to be more about using anticolonial slogans to justify personal irritation than concern for the best ways of fighting the virus. But if we care about public health we need to point out that another strategy is also needed to fight Covid-19. It, too, is not a “white solution”. The WHO has pointed out that lockdowns only defend against the virus. They can slow its spread, but cannot beat it. To do that you need an aggressive method that has beaten Covid19 in some parts of the world: testing as many people as possible, isolating all who test positive and, if they show symptoms, treating them.
It is not a substitute for a lockdown and often the two are used together. But it is a more lasting solution.
This strategy was pioneered by South Korea and has rolled back the virus there. And, because it is also the WHO’s preferred approach, it is presumably an Ethiopian solution too. Western governments have not introduced mass testing (though it did work in some local areas in Italy) and have paid a huge price in death tolls and infection rates. Unlike China, South Korea is a democracy with a free media, so its claim that testing has greatly reduced infections is surely accurate.
This country’s government has recognised that any benefits from the lockdown may be temporary unless the time is used to scale up testing dramatically. There are obvious constraints, but a mass testing campaign here may be no more difficult than a lockdown. It needs money, equipment and personnel, but so does a lockdown. And people are less likely to resist.
So, South Africans should support the Chinese/Ethiopian inspired lockdown. But whether you want a solution that is not Western or simply one that works, it is equally important to insist that the government make good on its Korean/Ethiopian inspired commitment to test widely too.