It’s going to be tough, but we’ll get through it

THE COVID-19 numbers started to rise, seriously, this week.

The Western Cape, unfortunately, is the front runner with more than 66% of the reported coronavirus cases and 77% of the infection-related deaths.

The Eastern Cape, is catching up fast – frighteningly so. The rest of the country will not be far off.

This is the reality of the pandemic – we have seen this trajectory play out in Asia, Europe and the US.

There will be an understandable tendency to become alarmed by the spike in infections. We might even become despondent. We should not do either.

On Monday, when South

Africa went down to level 3 of the lockdown, this was not because the worst had passed, but rather because we had achieved the objectives laid out in the government plan.

The government’s strategy was never to break the transmission of the infection, but to slow it down.

It did this admirably, buying itself much-needed time.

Without a vaccine, there was never going to be a silver bullet; reopening the economy and going back to class were never signals of anything other than it being time to return to the new normal – a world where the risk of infection is an ever-present reality, but a manageable risk at that.

As the president said, it’s in our hands now.

We need not get infected. In fact, there is much that we can do to prevent ourselves getting infected if we follow the basic precepts: wear a mask, keep our physical distance, and regularly and thoroughly wash our hands. We will get through this.

It will be tough and it will require even more of us than we thought the lockdown had, but we will prevail.

Let’s not lose sight of that.