Fumbling in the dark in a virus vacuum

It was fear that shut down the world. The images coming out of Wuhan — people collapsed on pavements, staff in hazmat suits shuffling through panicfilled hospital wards — were chilling.

When it spread to Italy and numbers started becoming available, the potential spread of the pandemic seemed infinite and horrifying.

Most frightening of all was the Chinese response.

When a vast moneymaking machine that regularly tortures its own people lunges for the factory kill-switch to safeguard human life, it’s fair to assume it has seen something unprecedented and utterly nightmarish on the horizon.

In other words, in late March a hard lockdown wasn’t just a good response, it was the only response.

Almost seven weeks later, though, we know more.

First, we know this is very, very complicated and anyone who is offering simplistic solutions is either selling a book or trying to get re-elected to stay out of jail.

We know governments around the world have started playing a brutal zero-sum game in which victories against the virus are measured in economic destruction.

But what we still don’t know, at least in SA, is how it’s going.

The government has told us the lockdown is working, at least in terms of its stated goals of buying our doctors more time and minimising deaths.

But having never shared its calculations with us, when the state says the lockdown is working many are wondering: compared to what?

Inevitably, South Africans are groping for their own statistics in an effort to work out where we are, often with wildly divergent results.

Graphs, in particular, are being abused most cruelly.

Spend five minutes on social media and you can find any graph to support any argument, from ones showing SA’s Covid-19 cases in isolation, curving terrifyingly upwards, to those comparing our tally with that of the US, according to which we have barely budged off a flat line.

I too have found myself clutching at numerical straws, a dangerous activity when one is neither a mathematician nor an epidemiologist.

But one number in particular has leapt out at me.

It is, simply, where we were on Sunday night, 18 days after we reached the rather grim milestone of having one death per million citizens, compared to where others were at the same point.

Spain, hit hard and early in the pandemic, saw its deathsper-million rise from one to 139 in those 18 days.

Belgium, on its way to becoming the country with by far the highest mortality rate per capita, was on 125.

Italy was on 80, the UK on 77, and the US on 45. Germany, lauded for its low death toll, had lost 30 people in every million.

And SA? In the 18 days since our death rate reached one per million it had reached 3.27 per million.

Compared to those countries above, we were barely on the graph.

Indeed, the country that most closely matched our progress was South Korea, widely regarded as the model to emulate, at 2.96 deaths per million.

At this point I must stress that I am not suggesting we have beaten this thing and should romp off into stage 1 lockdown.

Likewise, being better off than Belgium or Spain isn’t saying much.

I am not a scientist and remain entirely open to the possibility that too great a relaxation of the lockdown could result in our numbers blowing out and threatening the longfeared collapse of the health care system.

There is an argument made to remain extremely cautious.

But I don’t know how to make it, because arguments must be backed up with facts and figures, and right now South Africans aren’t being given enough meaningful ones.

It is vital that we be shown where we are; that Zweli Mkhize or Cyril Ramaphosa tell us what 3.27 deaths per million really means, now, seven weeks later.

If that figure rises to four or five or 10 this week, it is vital that they tell us what the change means for our collective future.

But of course they won’t. The state has retreated into an apparently endless, opaque present, in which progress is unknowable because there is no past to use for comparison, and in which speculation about the future is entirely pointless.

Fear was the animating energy of the lockdown.

If our infections blow out and the death count surges, South Africans will reinforce the lockdown themselves.

But if we continue to drift in this limbo, getting poorer every day without being told precisely why it’s worth it, conspiracy theory, toxic agendas and bad maths will sweep the lockdown away, and with it thousands of lives that could have — and should have — been saved.

● Eaton is an Arena group