Testing time ahead for humans and the economy both

There’ll be more than just the one lockdown extension announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday. There’ll be another at the end of April, when this one expires, and another after that. Get used to it. We’re in lockdown because we don’t know how widespread coronavirus infections really are, but if you want to become an instant expert, go online and look at spotlightnsp.co.za, a publication that watches our health services like a hawk. It has just interviewed the heads of the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS), which you’ve probably never heard of.

Neither had I, but both the NHLS chair and the CEO assure Spotlight they are geared up for mass testing — that they can already do 15,000 tests a day and in 10 days’ time could take that up to 36,000 a day, most with a pretty quick result. Add private sector capacity to that and the country could potentially be testing 50,000 people a day by the end of this extended lockdown.

That would be no small feat. But the NHLS bosses complain they are being underused. That’s because the NHLS can only test what gets sent to its laboratories. Sure, it’ll soon be able to take mobile testing stations out to rural areas (each with one driver and two nurses, what could possibly go wrong? I suggest we add a mechanic and a bouncer), but the screening and referrals for testing have to be done by provincial health departments. Imagine what that might mean in the Eastern Cape or North West.

But on the optimistic assumption that people actually do their jobs properly, we could try to emulate the South Koreans. They are 51-million people and we are 57-million. By early April they had tested 350,000 citizens, with fantastic results. To get to 350,000 tests by the end of May (given that we have already done about 50,000, mainly in the private sector, we would need to do fewer than 10,000 tests a day.

That’s doable. But will we? There’s a strange absence of information. We get a daily update on new cases and deaths, but surely the government, if it is indeed “rolling out” mass testing, would be all over the media asking them to come and watch? Maybe I’m missing something.

The fact is that the longer this process takes to implement, the more economically malignant the lockdown becomes. Most of the damage to our economy may have been done long before the first human was ever infected with the virus, but with the lockdown the axe falls with brutal finality.

Ramaphosa on Thursday appealed to big companies forced to close their operations not to pull contracts with their suppliers. Way, way too late. If he thinks companies like Distell and SAB have not been in full cost-cutting mode since he announced the lockdown, let him not be in any doubt what his extension will do.

Why buy bottles and cans and tops and labels and boxes from suppliers when you can’t sell your product? Has the government seen a shred of evidence to suggest that the prohibition of sales of alcohol and cigarettes might prevent the spread of Covid-19?

There’s none. What has happened here is that a few ministers have been allowed to impose their pet phobias on the rest of us, at great cost to the fiscus and, ultimately, to the state’s ability to pay public sector wages and welfare.

Not all of it is forever, though. At some stage all that liquidity being pumped into big Western economies will do what it always does and start looking around for yield. Then it’ll come here and rescue the local stock market like it did after the US Fed began quantitative easing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Saving the stock market and the pensions invested in it is one thing. But yield-seeking money created no jobs here after 2008 and it won’t this time either. The rich will simply get richer. The poor? Well, they may get a shot at one of the “non-invasive” ventilators Ramaphosa says we are going to start making in SA. Only it’s not a ventilator. A real one gets you a tube shoved down your throat past your vocal cords for two weeks if you’re lucky. Our ventilators are going to be a better class of oxygen mask.

By the time you need oxygen with Covid-19 you’re already in big trouble and the future of the economy may not be top of mind. But heaven help you if you ever get off the O2 because unless Ramaphosa, having given the health and security hawks on his team this extension, pulls his thumb out and begins to reignite what economy is left, you might wish you hadn’t.