Professor Alex van den Heever, chair in Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Governance, has raised concerns about the pandemic’s trajectory.
In an article in News24, he writes: ‘While the lockdown initially impacted on the trajectory, the effects were limited. The initial decline in the reproduction rate R was largely attributable to the suppression of the pandemic in affluent communities.
‘It went from around 2.2 before the lockdown (one infected person infects 2.2 people over a period of four days) to 0.7. This only lasted for 12 days before we shifted to around 1.1 to 1.2.’
However, due to inadequate screening and testing in all the provinces, except the Western Cape, the reported infections ‘are unlikely to be a true reflection of the situation’.
‘The new numbers driving the trajectory are almost exclusively driven by the Western Cape, which is erroneously described as the epicentre of the epidemic. An epicentre is the centre-point of an outbreak, not the largest detected outbreak.’
Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and the Free State ‘have demonstrated implausibly low increases, in all likelihood attributable to poorly implemented screening, testing and tracing strategies’.
Projecting the trajectory at the current level of R, ‘we can expect about 3 000 new infections per day by 31 May and 26 000 new infections per day by 30 June. After that the numbers become seriously large’.
While the government repeatedly says it has ‘flattened the curve’, assuming that a lowered R reduces the peak of the epidemic, this is false.
‘The active flattening only occurs when R is maintained at 1 or below through public health measures.
Van den Heever argues that, as the analytical work and assumptions underpinning a ‘flattening’ have never been made public, it is difficult to address directly the quality of the advice that is being given.
It is ‘hard to understand the current priorities of the government’.
‘The combination of excessive enforcement of non-essential measures, together with the failure to take forward common sense measures, is concerning and plainly losing the trust of society. The court challenges we see today are a sign of this. It would not occur if the measures made sense, and if valid information was made public which supported decision-making.
‘The government will go to court to defend a meaningless ban on cigarettes, but will not ramp up testing or protect old people collecting social grants,’ Van den Heever says.