Key advice the government ignored from its Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) included reopening schools earlier, and not allowing taxis to operate at full capacity.
And, despite having one of the earliest and harshest lockdowns in the world, South Africa never managed to reduce the transmission rate of Covid-19, the advisories by MAC experts show.
This emerges from a batch of 45 MAC advisories made public by the government on Thursday. The MAC could only provide advisories in response to requests from the Department of Health and was not free to give advice when it felt it was required.
News24 reported that the advisories show that a failure to scale up coronavirus testing and contact tracing resulted in the harsh lockdown not reducing the transmission rate of infection.
It is acknowledged that the government followed important elements of advice from the MAC, and also that the lockdown was beneficial in giving health authorities time to prepare the health system and procure equipment and supplies.
But the report said the failure to scale up testing and contact tracing significantly led to the local epidemic not being suppressed.
As early as May, the MAC recommended that schools should be reopened ‘as soon as possible’. The experts were also strongly against allowing taxis to return to 100% carrying capacity.
On 19 May, the MAC advised that ‘generalised lockdown is no longer the most appropriate strategy’ and recommended relaxed restrictions, which were adopted under lockdown Level 3.
The MAC was critical of regulations under lockdown Level 4, which prohibited the sale of or trade in certain items – such as open-toed shoes – which had no rational connection to slowing the spread of Covid-19.
The advisory of 22 July, aimed at answering several key questions from the National Coronavirus Command Council, reveals that the lockdown did not reduce the transmission rate of the virus.
The advisory read: ‘South Africa, despite having one of the earliest and harshest lockdowns for a protracted period of time, never achieved suppression/reversal and never attained a R < 1.’
The experts explained that this was a key objective in containing the spread of the virus: an R rate – or effective transmission rate – of above one means that each infected person is infecting more than one other person. An R rate of below one means the epidemic is effectively under control.
‘This can be attributed to multiple factors that include: the lack of an integrated ecosystem approach to the Covid outbreak from initiating community screening to tracking Covid-19 disease outcomes; the inability to scale-up community testing, with concomitant long turn-around times and inadequate contact tracing that could lead to the timeous isolation of cases and close contacts. Contact tracing was never achieved at scales required to contain the epidemic despite having one of the largest testing programmes in Africa,’ it said.
In South Africa, positive cases grew yesterday by 1 846 to a cumulative total of 620 132 (with 533 935 recoveries). Deaths rose by 115 to 13 743.
The highest tally of cases is in Gauteng (208 579), followed by KwaZulu-Natal (111 863), the Western Cape (105 507) and the Eastern Cape (85 701).