Coronavirus: Why bring them home?

SOUTH Africa is to repatriate more than 100 of its citizens from Wuhan – the epicentre of the so-called coronavirus outbreack that has terrified the world – and then hold them in quarantine back home for 21 days before releasing them to their families.

Why?

Why not leave them in Wuhan, where, by all accounts, the Chinese government is doing a sterling job containing the virus and slowly bringing it under control?

Instead, we are bringing 132 people home out of a total of 199, because they’re sick of being cooped up in China. So, we will coop them up here instead, except we have no experience of dealing with the virus because we have no recorded cases as yet.

There is no doubt that as an economic powerhouse of Africa, we will eventually get coronavirus victims – it’s inevitable given our close ties to China and Europe and the US, which are all now starting to record their own victims.

Irrespective of what our authorities might say, it’s a highly daunting prospect because this country – whether it is politically correct to say or not – is caught in the vice of a compromised public health-care system and a public whose health is generally compromised, in a country blighted by gross poverty.

It is this unholy trinity that made listeriosis the killer it became in 2018, unlike in other better off societies. Now we want to bring

132 people from the epicentre of this latest global health scare back home?

Patriotism is one thing; pragmatism is a totally different beast. If the president really wants to show the country and its citizens how much he cares he can help start bringing the state capturers to book and throwing them in jail – not potentially speeding up the spread of the virus as has been the case in Singapore, the US and Canada.