Prevention better than cure, but this ordeal does neither
Yay! Lockdown’s over. There’s almost nothing worthwhile left on the list of stuff you can’t do. OK, you can’t go to the beach, but you can crowd together on the walkway next to it. You can’t go visit your mom and dad, but you could talk to them on the promenade. Or at church? When did that last happen? Your housekeeper can come back to work but you can’t have visitors.
The lesson to learn here is that whatever the threat, locking down is a helluva lot easier than opening up. There are mistakes and glaring contradictions and idiocies, and I suspect ministers know exactly what they are. Their job has been to try and stop us going out to work or shop and now, from tomorrow, they’ve basically given up. Look after yourself.
That may be a novel concept but it’s easy. Wash your hands a lot. Don’t touch your face. Keep your distance. Wear a mask. Literally, do all those things and your chances of avoiding Covid-19 are as good as it gets.
Level 3 lockdown gets most of us back to work. Those of us lucky still to have jobs have been doing them from home and probably still should. Pray for the working stiffs who have to get up before dawn in crowded townships, find a safe way to get to work 20km away and then spend the day avoiding colleagues at the office, shop or factory.
Our numbers are still low but they’ll shoot up now, so panic responsibly. Being scared is good but no whole province or metro is returning to level 4 now. It’s too late.
This is going to be bad, but not that bad. Advice to the government is that 50,000 people could die. I can’t see that. We’re Africans, after all — I reckon we grow up here with more germs and viruses than anywhere else on the planet. We’re tougher, but it’s a good thing that the virus shines a light on our deeper vulnerabilities. We have HIV/Aids and tuberculosis and we’re obese and diabetic.
If the government had any sense it would copy Discovery and find a way to incentivise health. How much fitter would we be if your tax bracket, or welfare grant, for instance, was correlated to your body mass index? The thinner you are, the less the state would have to spend on health care for you, after all.
Or it could greatly increase the tax on cigarettes. In the UK a packet of 20 Camels costs more than R200 these days. Here we have impetuously banned the sale of tobacco and unleashed a whole new class of criminal upon the land. And when the ban is lifted, these guys, now they have their networks, will find something else to traffic.
I have tried to understand the ban. Co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma says cigarettes are simply unhealthy. We know that, but so is sugar and by my very rough calculation the comorbidities accompanying most deaths in SA by Covid19 so far have been either diabetes or obesity. Lungs compromised by smoking have yet to feature in my reading.
Dlamini-Zuma is not the only supporter of the tobacco ban. I understand both professors Salim Abdool Karim, head of the medical advisory committee to the government on the pandemic, and his deeply expert epidemiologist wife, Quarraisha, at least initially supported it.
So I asked the scientist I’ve come to admire most during this whole thing what he thought.
He is Francois Balloux, the widely respected head of the genetics institute at University College London and a professor of computational systems biology there. A few weeks ago he co-authored a paper on mutations in the virus. I asked him on Twitter what he thought of the ban, given that almost every report I read shows that the proportion of smokers hospitalised for Covid-19 is well below the percentage of smokers in whatever society they are part of.
He replied: “Personally I can’t think of any scientific justification for a ban on tobacco in the context of Covid-19.”
That’s good enough for me, but not for Dlamini-Zuma. Fortunately, she will lose the court actions she now has to defend because she cannot possibly demonstrate that her ban is preventing the spread of the virus.
My heart meanwhile goes out to smokers, but especially to recovering drug addicts or alcoholics or people dealing with any form of depression. There are millions in SA who fall into these categories and many are people I know and love. Any rehab facility today will be an ocean of pain. Addicts show tremendous courage in shedding their monsters but they almost all end up smoking tobacco. Depriving them of their fix is nothing less than a torture.