Eateries need clarity — even as Covid bites
More than a week after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a further easing of lockdown level 3 restrictions, including the reopening of restaurants, there’s still no sign of any regulations coming through.
This is a 1-million person industry in its widest sense, but restaurants remain closed.
You can see why. First, there’s an argument in cabinet about serving alcohol with meals given the spike in violence and car accidents when the ban on alcohol sales was lifted on June 1 after more than two months of prohibition.
Second, ministers will be watching, mortified, at the surge in Covid-19 cases. SA had zero cases on March 3 and 50,000 cases on June 8. In just the next two weeks, by June 22, that had doubled to more than 100,000 cases. The disease is spreading super fast in the Eastern Cape, which can’t cope, and Gauteng, which probably can.
It will eventually be everywhere and by the end of the week the Western Cape will probably account for less than half the total cases for the first time in months.
The spread is agonising to watch, particularly as friends and loved ones and neighbours become infected. And, some, really sick. ICU wards throughout the Western Cape are full to bursting. Doctors report a nightmare. There is a public clamour to close schools, to clamp down again, but the genie is out of the bottle, just as the government scientific advisers said it would be.
Near Mount Frere more than 200 people at a boarding school test positive and parents rush to fetch their children. The science flies out the window. Most of the science says children don’t die from Covid-19 and nor are they that infectious. It is the adults around them who are.
But this may not be the last time Ramaphosa will have promised a relaxation he can’t deliver. On tobacco it was the determined opposition of arguably the most politically senior minister in the cabinet, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. On restaurants, it will have been a mixture of a lingering argument about drinking and the sudden surge in infections.
To be fair, the surge would make even the strongest “relaxer” pause. A comment on Bloomberg on the resurgence of infections as some US states relax lockdowns noted: “Outbreaks don’t politely distribute themselves according to available beds, a reality which is already manifesting itself in reports of filling intensive care units in Houston. Hospital stays for severe Covid infection are often lengthy, which means that beds are quicker to fill than empty.
“The data make it clear that some states opened too broadly and incautiously, with too much Covid circulating,” the Bloomberg piece said. “Cracking down on businesses that don’t require distancing, closing those like nightclubs that never should have been opened, boosting contacttracing and isolation efforts and enforcing broad mask use can significantly reduce transmission risk … a sense of urgency is overdue.”
It points to the dilemma of opening up the economy. If opening up just the little we have here suddenly leads to a spike in infections, or whether the infections were inevitable anyway, the fact is that political decisions have to be made, and quickly. The science is done for the moment.
Listening to finance minister Tito Mboweni tell parliament when he delivered his emergency budget on Wednesday afternoon that our consolidated budget deficit this financial year, which once looked to be creeping ominously towards 6% of GDP, will now, because of the virus and the three-month lockdown, be 15.7% of GDP, you get an idea of what is at stake and how screwed we are.
Mboweni reckoned he’d be looking for R40bn in new taxes in the next four years, but how do you get that kind of blood out of a stone just crushed like our economy? And, please, drop the pretence that the R200bn loan guarantee scheme is working. It isn’t. The banks won’t lend to people who need the money, so what good is it? Tens of thousands of businesses will close. They won’t pay tax. Or rent. Or salaries. Or suppliers. Hundreds of thousands more people will be unemployed. How do you tax them?
You can’t. Nor, surely, can you continue curtsying to Dlamini-Zuma’s bonkers obsession with keeping tobacco sales banned and letting criminals rule the trade when there is R1bn of taxes going down the drain because of it — because of her — every month? We. Need. Every. Cent.
This isn’t easy. We were damaged goods before the storm but I don’t think there is a case to stop opening the economy, no matter how awful this epidemic begins to look. Many of the second 50,000 infections recorded will have begun under stage 4. And it is too easy to blame alcohol for a spike in trauma without also blaming the prior prohibition, which was foolish in the first place. Reports say calls to gender-based violence help centres have fallen since the relaxation to stage 3. Who would have thought?
Ramaphosa needs to keep his promise to restaurants and their workers. They need clarity, quickly.
AND, PLEASE, DROP THE PRETENCE THAT THE R200BN LOAN GUARANTEE SCHEME IS WORKING. IT ISN’T