With the country in lockdown, now for the clincher: mass testing
Ten days into the 21-day lockdown, 1,505 infections and seven confirmed deaths. This is how SA’s battle to contain the deadly novel coronavirus is shaping up, and we are yet to reach our peak. Our worst fears keep becoming reality. When Covid-19 was still confined to China and Europe, we prayed it would not reach our shores, but it did. We hoped the numbers would remain low, but they soon hit 100, then 500, and now a thousand and a half. We expressed relief that almost all confirmed cases were of people who had travelled abroad, until the first local infection was confirmed. At one point we crossed our fingers hoping for no Covid-19-related deaths, until the first fatality was reported. We held our breath in diminishing hope that townships and other mass areas would not be affected, until cases were confirmed in Alexandra and Khayelitsha.
The government has received global praise for the urgent and comprehensive manner in which it reacted to the outbreak, including instituting the nationwide lockdown.
“South Africa seems to have acted faster, more efficiently, and more ruthlessly than many other countries around the world. Heading the fight here against Covid-19, President Cyril Ramaphosa has emerged as a formidable leader — composed, compassionate, but seized by the urgency of the moment and wasting no time in imposing tough restrictive steps and galvanising crucial support from the private sector,” the BBC extolled in an online article this week.
But this high praise could quickly turn into scorn if SA does not test enough people, the surest way of identifying actual infection rates and flattening the curve. This week, the government announced that it has begun to roll out an intensified testing operation in which thousands of health-care field workers will visit homes in urban and rural areas. It is aimed at the early detection and rapid isolation of those testing positive for the coronavirus.
According to health minister Zweli Mkhize, the
National Health Laboratory Service is ramping up its testing capabilities to facilitate up to 50,000 tests a day.
Currently, the service has the capacity to test about
5,000 samples a day. We endorse these new efforts at mass testing, given that they have worked elsewhere.
But as we report today, leading medical researchers are warning that the slow rise in SA’s Covid-19 infections could actually point to a dangerous catastrophe waiting to happen, with the country potentially on a worse infection trajectory than Spain and Italy.
Professor Shabir Madhi, a vaccinology expert at the Medical Research Council, warns that lower infection rates are mostly due to the lockdown as people test less, and that infections within townships could explode within days if mass testing is not done immediately. Professor Mosa Moshabela, dean of public health and the Nursing School at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, cautions that lower infection rates are not due to the war on the virus being won but because testing requirements were only for those who travelled overseas, and those who were in contact with those who travelled overseas.
We must heed warnings from these scientists and urge the public and private sector to ensure that as many people as possible are tested. We applaud Discovery Health and Vodacom for encouraging their customers to undergo risk screening. They have created a joint fund to pay doctors for 100,000 Covid-19 virtual consultations. Germany and South Korea are proof that testing and the early imposition of social distancing measures can have a remarkable impact. As confirmed cases in Germany passed 71,000, the death toll on Wednesday was 775, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. South Korea had 10,100 cases and 177 deaths. In contrast, Italy has reported almost 106,000 infections and more than 12,400 deaths, and Spain has more than 102,000 cases with over 9,000 deaths. We need to learn from Germany and South Korea and make mass testing the highest priority in the battle against the coronavirus.
There is proof that testing can have a remarkable impact