South Africa: “Balancing Act” lasts as government decides on future of blockade

04/22/2020 Ethiopia



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As the end of the extended national blockade approaches, discussions on whether to extend the blockade or relax it have generated pertinent problems for the government to consider.

You have a difficult decision to make.

Last week, the chairman of the government’s advisory committee, infectious disease professor Salim Abdool Karim, explained that evaluations of the effectiveness of the blockade would be carried out based on the rate of infections registered that week.

This period of time has passed, leading the government to evaluate the outcome and consider the impact of the blockade.

On Tuesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that he will address the nation on “additional economic and social aid measures that are part of the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic.”

There are factors the government will need to take into account when deciding on the fate of the blockade, in a balancing act to control the pandemic, according to Dr. Glenda Gray, a leading South African scientist and member of the government’s advisory committee.

“You are sitting with a fragile economy, a fragile health system, and an epidemic that can spiral out of control, so you have to balance all of those things, it is a balancing act,” Gray explained.

The serious social situation

“The question the government has to answer is how many more infections can the blockage prevent, so there can be an adequate medical response.”

“There will be an overlap because the longer the block, the more control you can have over the transmission. But the longer the block, the more unintended consequences of the block will start to emerge,” Gray said.

In his weekly letter Monday, Ramaphosa explained that they had to consider the impact the blockade would have “on an already faltering economy in both the short and long term, and the impact of this substantial disruption on the livelihoods of millions of people.” .

These factors would also have to be discussed to find a way forward, Gray said.

“People start to feel hungry, depressed, angry and become incredibly poor. Even before closing, we had high unemployment rates, we had a shrinking economy, and the main entities had degraded us.”

Gray added that these decisions would have consequences, making it difficult to choose the government.

“As physicians, we obviously would like to keep everyone locked up, so that we can control the epidemic, but that is not practical and feasible for poor people in a struggling economy.”

Gray said there had to be a plan for what could happen after the shutdown. Strategies should be created to minimize the transmission of Covid-19, including continuing the approach the government had already taken, such as physical distancing, wearing masks, and reducing meetings.

“The transmission will happen, and the important thing is to track where the transmission is going and to contain it wherever it is found. You have to see who should stay inside: should we keep people who are sick or over 60 isolated?”

Adequate medical response

The government will also need to ensure that hospitals can cope with an influx of patients and that public and private hospitals coordinate to maximize response efforts, Gray said.

“The goal of flattening the curve is to spread the epidemic so that you don’t get the kind of spike you would see if we did nothing.”

“No intervention gives you a very high peak, and when you have this high peak, the ability of healthcare to respond cannot happen,” he explained.

In countries with a high number of Covid-19 cases and death rates, health systems have collapsed closely by running out of hospital beds, ICUs, healthcare workers, and personal protective equipment (PPE).