Booze ban hangover
Experts say preventing alcohol sales won’t solve the overcrowding of the health system and there is little data available to support the correlation between the lifting of the first ban and public health capacity.
Government should have prepared better during hard lockdown period.
Banning alcohol will not take the flooded health system out of crisis, experts say, as the country reels from a second ban on booze, among further restrictions announced on Sunday following the worst month for Covid-19 cases in June.
However, professor Alex van den Heever, head of the Wits School of Governance, wanted to know what had happened to the millions of rands poured into creating field hospitals.
In one of the harshest alcohol prohibitions since the apartheid-era ban on alcohol sales to black citizens, the government used the rationale that it had an indirect and direct effect on the public health system’s resources.
Little data was available to support the correlation between the lifting of the first alcohol ban and public health resources.
But according to the latest figures, Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital treated nearly 3 000 patients in its trauma unit in June.
Statistics compiled by the Gauteng department of health showed from 1 to 30 June, the trauma unit treated 2 730 patients.
The cases were gunshots, stabbings, motor vehicle accidents, passenger vehicle accidents (buses and taxis), burns, assaults, falls, cuts, motorbike accidents and other trauma.
In March, the hospital’s trauma unit treated 2 217 people.
The hard lockdown, when alcohol was banned, was effected on 27 March.
The breakdown of statistics shows the trauma unit saw more than 100 cases on seven individual days – on 1 June, 117; 2 June, 120; 13 June, 132; 20 June, 109; 27 June, 133; 29 June, 104 and 30 June, 141 patients.
According to the national department of health yesterday, Gauteng had an 80% increase in trauma cases and Western Cape hospitals had reported 90 people admitted a day since the lifting of the alcohol ban.
Van den Heever said government had yet to make a good argument for banning alcohol.
Rather, he said, government should have used the threemonth hard lockdown to prepare.
“I haven’t seen a detailed rationale and if they have it in writing that the reason for the surge in in-patients is because of alcohol-related trauma, that would be correct, but the current increase ... has been predominantly because of Covid-19,” he said. “It’s hard to understand what they were actually doing for this period. “You can see what was done in the Western Cape and they don’t need an alcohol ban – they don’t even need private hospital beds any more [because] the number of patients went down, and if they keep up the prevention
Increase predominantly because of Covid-19
strategy and maintain it, they are perfectly fine. And that is what Gauteng should have done.”
According to research published in 2018 in BMC Medicine, an estimated 62 300 South Africans died from alcohol-related causes in 2015.
And the South African Medical Journal in 2014 reported the tangible financial cost of alcohol harm alone was estimated at R37.9 billion, or 1.6% of the 2009 gross domestic product.
But some people have argued that the rise in trauma cases could not directly be blamed on alcohol consumption alone, without the context of the opening up of industries, increased freedom of movement and more road traffic.
More pointedly, Van den Heever said alcohol-related trauma cases would be a drop in the ocean compared to the expected number of cases the country was facing in the next few weeks.
It could, therefore, be argued that the ban would be relatively ineffective in dealing with the Covid-19 healthcare crisis, for which none of the provinces, save for the Western Cape, appeared to be sufficiently ready and resourced.
According to a recent government reply to the Democratic Alliance (DA), the Eastern Cape only had one field hospital, constructed with assistance from car manufacturer Volkswagen. At 35% completion, the hospital was far from ready, but the completed section was being used for Covid-19 admissions.
None of the seven field hospitals, including extensions to existing hospitals, were complete, but some were in partial use.
In Gauteng, Nasrec was the province’s only field hospital, with 500 beds, currently being used for Covid-19 treatment and quarantine.
Van den Heever and DA health spokesman Jack Bloom pointed out it had yet to be equipped with sufficient intensive and high care support equipment.
Limpopo, the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga did not have field hospitals.
In contrast the DA-led Western Cape government had completed the construction of all of its field hospitals. These included Cape Town International Convention Centre, which had 870 beds, and Brackengate, which was expected to receive its first patients last weekend. – simnikiweh@citizen.co.za