The government’s phased exit from the lockdown is nonsensical and unscientific, says one of the top scientists advising it, according to News24.
Dr Glenda Gray, a member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) and chairperson of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), said the lockdown should be eradicated completely and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) like hand washing, wearing masks, social distancing and prohibitions on gatherings should be put in place.
Gray is a specialist pediatrician, an HIV vaccine researcher, a recipient of the Order of Mapungubwe, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2017.
Speaking in her private capacity she said doctors were seeing children with malnutrition for the first time in decades. ‘[It’s] almost as if someone is sucking regulations out of their thumb and implementing rubbish, quite frankly. The de-escalation, month on month, to various levels is nonsensical and unscientific.’
Gray said: ‘You don’t put the whole country into lockdown because you don’t know how to deal with [the] elderly and the people who have vulnerabilities.… the government has failed to understand the psyche of its populace.’
Dr Ian Sanne, a member of the MAC and associate professor at the clinical HIV Research Unit at Wits University said the MAC was not asked about downgrading to Level 3.
Avvording to News24 Sanne said that missed appointments by HIV-positive patients had increased by 40% and 60% and similar was expected for diabetes and other chronic illnesses.
Childhood vaccination programmes had also declined significantly he said, which would likely lead to a substantial outbreak of childhood diseases. Furthermore, there had also been declines in semi-urgent surgeries, early onset cancer treatments and maternity screenings.
Hospital admissions had declined by 75% in the private sector. “We should be using the opportunity to catch up on elective surgery,” Sanne said.
Another MAC member, Professor Marc Mendelson, head of infectious diseases and HIV medicine at Groote Schuur Hospital, said that he believed that phasing out the lockdown is not science-led. Rather, it is based on other countries’ attempts to flatten the curve, but the successful countries were able to test, trace and quarantine quickly on a mass scale. Says Mendelson: ‘The evidence they are basing their assumptions on is wrong.’
Department of Health spokesperson, Popo Maja, said the MAC’s ‘[A]rgument that there is very good evidence about the measures to be taken and we should simply follow such a path, is simply inaccurate.’ He added that the government took the advice of the MAC seriously.
According to News24 Maja said: ‘The responsibility for implementation is government – not the MAC. Hence, we simply can’t implement the advice of the MAC without interrogating the matter as government, since we are ultimately responsible and accountable.’
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