Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The virus will run its course...
... but the social impact of the lockdown and the financial ruin it causes will be counted long afterwards
ON March 26 President Cyril Ramaphosa sent the country into national lockdown in what seems like a hand played to mitigate his personal political liability.
At the end of the pandemic, if the virus is seen to have been controlled with a low incidence and mortality rate, then the president can claim his plan was effective. If the incidence and death toll seem particularly high, he and the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) can say they did everything in their power to curtail its effect and that without these measures the figures might have been even higher. A win-win situation for the presidency if the only outcome looked at is health.
But what about all the businesses bankrupted, the millions of jobs lost, the emotional distress caused?
The National Treasury has estimated that 3 million to 7 million jobs will be lost due to the lockdown. Professor Alex van den Heever, chairperson of Social Security Administration and Management Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, stated that the country is losing R13 billion daily and called on the government to open up the economy.
When the government was first questioned about the source of data used to justify their decision to shut the economy down, they said the figures were “too scary” to share with the public. Did the NCCC base its initial decisions on the projection made by the since disgraced and dismissed British professor, Neil Ferguson, whose 15-year-old model was used to compute the numbers for the UK and US?
John Steenhuisen, the interim leader of the DA, reminded South Africa that the only reason we entered into lockdown was to buy time to prepare hospitals and health-care workers for the inevitable wave of infections. “We weren’t trying to stop all Covid-19 infections nor kill the virus,” he said.
Why then was the initial threeweek lockdown period extended by two weeks and then plunged into an open-ended “risk adjusted” period?
Surely the Presidency must have done a thorough risk assessment before locking the country down, so to then announce on April 23 that a risk-adjusted strategy would be deployed seems erroneous?
A very important input into a risk assessment is accurate data.
According to the World Health Organization, “most people infected with the Covid-19 virus will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment. Older people, and those with underlying medical problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness”.
As of April 27, the median age of laboratory-confirmed cases in South Africa was 38, and as of May 2 the median age of patients who died was 64. These two very important facts should have guided how the risk assessment was conducted, ie, separate assessments for each at-risk group.
The government, however, has put all people into one pot. The NCCC’s methodology is especially egregious considering that factors such as industry sectors, population density, and access to health-care facilities also need to be factored in.
Furthermore, these inputs are only looking at health risks. What about the economic, social and environmental impacts? These need to be calculated together with the safety risks and weighed against each other. This exercise needs to address short-, medium- and long-term effects.
The social impact of the lockdown and the financial ruin caused by the government’s strategy will be counted long after the virus has run its course. And it will run its course.
Can the Presidency show that the positive outcomes of the lockdown outweigh the negative impact on the economy and psyche of the nation?