The time our world stopped
I SUPPOSE all columns in the world become Corona columns. They might like to think they are Sports columns or Business columns or Slightly Otherwise columns giving readers relief from the day’s theme-song. But the rules change.
Reader Rob Bradfield sums it up: “All the people of the world may end up remembering the Corona Outbreak like the Americans remember Kennedy’s assassination or The World Trade Center explosion.”
Note the discrete “may”. Even if the cure arrived tomorrow we’d always remember the time everything stopped. The best a self-respecting column can do is embrace the theme, trying to raise thoughts that aren’t yet clichés.
Well, one thought that can’t yet be a cliché or the thundering herd of ministers would have dived into it at SA’s entry for World’s Longest Media Briefing, is that lots of South Africans are foggy on geometric progression. That’s a series of numbers that grows by the same ratio. If the ratio is a half, 2 increases to 3, 6 increases to 9, 100 increases to 150.
I say with confidence that this thing bypasses many of my beloved countrymen, because I have asked. Over the past fortnight, post my own emigration from Scepticland, I have addressed people who seem unisolated and asked (over 2m) whether the virus does not, ahem, bug them. These are people from a wide range of “demographics”. Nearly all expressed an identical view, and a goodly portion expressed a second view as well.
The identical view is that it’s all overblown because, look, it’s only going up by a few hundred a time, and even the world figures are tiny as a proportion of 6 billion.
The second view comes from people like workseekers and recyclers with their bins: “If I don’t work today I don’t eat tonight.”
The assembled ranks of ministers might have got further for less shouting, ordering and prison-talk, à la Ministers Mbalula and Cele, and more arithmetic, plus some focus on terms like “soup kitchen”.
Mapisa-Nqakula (Defence), cited current figures: “Eight weeks ago two South Africans had the virus. Now it’s 704.” She might think of extending that. At this rate the next eight weeks – to May 22 – could deliver 247 808 corona cases and some 12 000 deaths.
If the rate persisted, June would start with a fifth of the population having shed their Covid, immune to its return. But they’d be burying 4 000 000 of their countrymen.
I’m respectfully submitting that the isolation cause falls down where it matters most. It falls down twice. First, people have an image that a few thousand die and then it stops. Second, they take the sublimely legitimate view that if they must select between starving now and possibly encountering a mystery bug in weeks to come, it’s no contest.
That said, I found it a pleasure to feel at one with several cabinet ministers. Mapisa-Nqakula inspirationally appealed for common sense rather than legalistic nit-picking, Nkosazana, who my media seem to know mainly in bad-guy frame, came across like your favourite aunt in elder-statesman mode, Messrs Lamola and Patel; Lindiwe Zulu in her uniform of
revised by Kim Jong-un… Covid does some nation building, too.
Last word stays with that internet line: “Your grandparents were called to fight in world wars, you’re called to sit on your couch and wash your hands. Don’t mess this up.”