In nine months of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems government has learnt little, as the crude lockdown measures foisted upon the Nelson Mandela Bay metro suggest. The most significant impact of tighter restrictions will be to kick the economy when it’s down.
Last week, president Cyril Ramaphosa announced stricter lockdown measures for the Nelson Mandela Bay metropolitan area, which is the epicentre of a new Covid-19 hotspot that has placed its healthcare infrastructure under great pressure.
A 10pm curfew was instituted, retail liquor sales have been prohibited on Fridays and weekends, religious gatherings have been limited to 100 people indoors and 250 people outdoors, and no venue may exceed 50% of its capacity.
It is unlikely that these measures will make a significant difference to infection, hospitalisation, or death numbers.
The first lockdown turned out to be counter-productive, resulting in a faster spread of the virus that causes Covid-19 because it confined people to crowded homes and townships.
Restricting or banning alcohol sales will have little impact. Black market entrepreneurs will simply stock up between Monday and Thursday, and supply punters out the back door on weekends. Home brewing and distilling will once again flourish.
Half of my friends have become moderately skilled at producing a variety of moderately drinkable alcoholic beverages. Although my friends are particularly awesome, I can’t imagine they’re the only ones to have spotted the gap in the market.
There’s even been talk of regulating access to beaches and parks, which are the healthiest, least risky places people could possibly go.
Because the new wave of infections is already well underway and community transmission is now routine, any interventions at this late stage are likely to be too little too late, if they have any measurable effect at all.
Bad tools
I do have some sympathy for the government. They simply do not have very good tools for managing the spread of a disease like Covid-19, so they use the very blunt tools they have. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Government treated citizens like naughty children from the get-go, imposing ridiculously punitive measures like banning cigarettes and outdoor exercise. This is now coming back to haunt them. Nobody is inclined to listen to the advice of a government that has proven to be petty, vindictive, distrustful and often, wrong.
That’s why people are having gatherings without any social distancing, masks, or other sanitary protocols. And if they can no longer have such gatherings at public venues, they’ll simply organise them privately.
That many of the new outbreak clusters are associated with exactly such private gatherings is no deterrent to the unwise, and government’s new rules won’t be, either. Just like they are no deterrent to taxi drivers who work without masks and fill their minibuses to the gunwales without any infection control precautions, despite the rules.
The most significant impact of tighter lockdown measures will be to kick the economy when it’s down. And by economy, I mean people. After all, what is an economy but the set of voluntary interactions between people all working to put food on their tables?
In the hotspots along the coast of the Eastern and Western Cape, the impact of lockdown this year has been brutal. The tourism, hospitality, and entertainment industries are on their knees. Many companies have gone out of business. People have sold everything they have or gone bankrupt. Some surviving restaurants have moved to smaller premises. The businesses that are still clinging on desperately need a good holiday season to pull them out of the grave the government dug for them.
That lifeline now seems to be under threat, not only in Nelson Mandela Bay, but also along the Garden Route, which health minister Zweli Mkhize ominously visited late last week. Word on the street is that the hammer will fall here, too, perhaps before the week is out.
It may already be too late, however. Even without additional lockdown measures, the uncertainty caused by the government’s Covid-19 response policies are threatening businesses and livelihoods.
Cancellations
I just had a call from a good friend of mine, Dominic Morel, who together with Jackie Barham runs Better Live, the Knysna region’s biggest live music promoter. After the total loss of 2020, he found himself between a rock and a hard place with the festive season.
He had a dozen great events lined up, including the annual Blues Festival. Many tickets have already been sold. Although Morel has the necessary permissions from the municipality and the local health department, the events face several serious risks.
One is that as other events in other towns along the coast get cancelled – and many of them have been – some of the bigger artists he has lined up might not be able to make it to the Knysna leg of their tour.
Another is that if any of his key staff, including himself, get fingered as close contacts and ordered to self-isolate for ten days, his ability to host the events could fall apart. Even more catastrophic would be if entire events get classified as ‘close contact’ events because a few people test positive, as the Ballito Rage festival recently did. Then you’d have no organisers, no staff, and no audience either, for many of the remaining events of the season.
Morel needed to make a call about spending tens of thousands on marketing, equipment hire, deposit payments and other expenses, with no guarantee that he’ll be able to recoup his investment.
He cannot predict what additional restrictions might be coming from on high in the next week, but even with no further lockdown rules, the season presents extraordinary risk and uncertainty.
Since he can’t carry the losses if things go wrong, and doesn’t want to make news headlines as a super-spreader, he has been forced to make the distressing decision to cancel every one of the events.
As I write this, he is informing artists, venues, sponsors and contractors. He is also contacting other event organisers who might be affected by losing Knysna as a major hub for live music.
That will have consequences for the staff working the events, the staff at the various venues, as well as for the musicians. For some of the artists, Knysna would have been the most profitable leg of their respective tours.
Imagine the food and drink that will go unsold now that twelve major events have been cancelled, and all the accommodation that will go unlet. Consider the cleaning staff and kitchen staff that won’t be needed. Not to mention that it will make the holiday season very dull indeed.
This kind of business is the very lifeblood of tourist destinations such as the Garden Route. It makes up a huge share of the economy. The tourism, hospitality and entertainment businesses face a critically uncertain season that they desperately need to succeed.
For some, like Morel, it’s already too late. The last thing the survivors need is for Mkhize to come blundering into town with a ban-hammer.
Do nothing
Contrary to the views of some prominent Covid-skeptics, the Covid-19 crisis is real. Hospitals are running close to capacity, are running short of supplies, and are running out of staff. Those healthcare workers who aren’t down with Covid-19 or in quarantine themselves are stressed, exhausted, and overworked. They are exasperated trying to deal with people who are reckless, entitled, and act like Covid-19 doesn’t exist.
For the doctors and nurses, there won’t be a festive season, even just with family. The clinics and hospitals simply cannot take the risk of even more staff falling ill.
What alternative does the government have, but to crack down again? Well, since crackdowns don’t achieve much, doing nothing would be a better alternative.
Alan Winde, the premier of the Western Cape, has wisely said that he’d prefer merely to enforce existing Level 1 regulations, such as wearing masks in public and ensuring adequate social distancing at public venues.
We are not early in the pandemic. The number of infected is not small. There is no evidence that interventions such as limiting numbers at public events will make a significant difference to the spread of Covid-19.
Whether five, 10, or 20 people come back from a given event with the virus, they’re going to infect others, and Covid will continue to spread. Shops, churches and public transport are just as much vectors for contagion.
Testing, tracing
The observation that the pandemic is now thoroughly established also raises questions about the dogmatic adherence to the test-track-and-trace mantra that the World Health Organisation recommended very early this year.
There are growing signs that the tests are not very reliable, which raises the question, is all the testing effort worth it?
Testing is not cheap. It diverts resources away from the other life-saving functions that hospitals perform. Tests are in any case conducted only on those who already display Covid-19 symptoms. At that point, why not simply treat them?
Tracking and tracing might make sense in a wealthy, organised, and disciplined (read: unfree) society. It doesn’t make sense in South Africa, however. Despite the incredibly hard work of our contact tracing teams, do we really think they reach even a fraction of the actual infected or at-risk population? And of the fraction they do reach, how many comply with self-isolation instructions?
If testing, tracking, and tracing were so effective, why did the Garden Route, which has been very diligent at all three since the start, turn into a new hotspot? Perhaps they’re not the solution that the World Health Organisation and national government had hoped they’d be.
Treat the sick
Instead of slavishly following protocols that have not proven to be successful, government could put its not inconsiderable weight behind an extensive public information campaign that informs people how to avoid the virus, what to do if they have symptoms, and how to protect the elderly and those with co-morbidities.
Testing resources could be devoted to the vulnerable in society, such as healthcare staff and the elderly, especially those in care institutions. That would free up clinics and hospitals to treat the sick as they would do under ordinary circumstances.
That wouldn’t be too different from what they do now, in any case. They only test symptomatic patients, and they only admit those whose vital signs, such as blood oxygen levels, indicate that treatment is required.
The virus will spread, as it inevitably will. Society should be left free to focus on protecting its most vulnerable members while going on with the daily business of putting food on the table. And that includes attending music festivals during the holiday season, provided basic sanitary precautions are in place.
Eventually, a vaccine will become available, it will be safe, and we can put all this rigmarole behind us. Until then, government should not use blunt and ineffective coercive instruments simply because they’re the only instruments it has available.
That won’t save any lives, but it will make us all poorer.
The views of the writers are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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