Safely navigating the return to school
WHILE many across the country have celebrated the easing of lockdown to level 2 the Covid-19 crisis is by no means behind us and South Africans must continue to be vigilant.
Speaking at a webinar on Tuesday as part of PSG’s Think Big series, Professor Glenda Gray, chief executive and president of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), said the virus is still very much with us and will be for months to come.
Gray, who trained as a paediatrician, came out strongly in support of returning children to school.
“One of the biggest tragedies of the pandemic is the long-lasting impact on children who have missed months of schooling.
“We need hero teachers, hero parents and a system that understands that we absolutely have to get our children back to school. We need to find ways to give teachers, parents and children the confidence to safely navigate being back at school.
“There are a number of ways to keep classrooms safe, and we should get younger teachers into the classrooms, while older teachers and those with comorbidities continue to work from home.
“Allowing education to grind to a halt is an avoidable tragedy since we all know that the only way out of poverty and joblessness is education.”
The education conundrum aside, Gray said that one of the most positive things to come out of the pandemic is the level of engagement by the public. “Our politicians, policymakers and ordinary citizens are all obsessing over numbers, learning about the science, and taking a key interest in the issues around health and livelihoods – I think this is a really positive development.”
Regarding a vaccine, Gray said there is an unprecedented race to find one and a lot of promising research is happening, but at this stage we still can’t accurately predict how soon we in South Africa could have widespread access to a vaccine.
Developing vaccines typically takes years. The time between reading a headline about a potential vaccine to when it has been through all the safety testing and regulatory approval, and then produced and distributed in the order of billions of doses is still anyone’s guess.
“What we know with more certainty is that we are going to be putting out veld fires all over the world until a vaccine is available globally,” said Gray.
Could the world have been better prepared for a pandemic? Gray says we could have done better with surveillance and taking pandemic preparedness more seriously.
“When we first heard about this unknown pneumonia in China, we thought it would be contained in Asia, and we watched from afar, without a proper understanding of how contagious this virus was and how quickly it could spread around the globe thanks to global travel.
“Because it’s hard to predict what the pathogen will be, it’s difficult to be ready with biomedical interventions for a pandemic,” said Gray.
Gray believes we also need to see this pandemic as a wake-up call so that we can avoid or be better prepared for potentially more dangerous diseases in the future.
“We have to better understand the interplay between climate change and zoonotic evolution as viruses jump the species barrier from animal hosts to humans. We have to be more vigilant and understand the potential impacts of human interaction with exotic species and the environment at large.”
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