The closure of the Garden Route’s beaches for the duration of the holiday season is supposed to curb the spread of Covid-19. It will do the opposite, and destroy what is left of the region’s economy in the process.
It’s hard to pick a winner for the most stupid lockdown regulation of 2020, but Monday night’s edict that closed all Garden Route and Sarah Baartman District parks and beaches for the entire holiday season must rank right up there.
It is hard to believe that anyone with half a brain and good intentions could sit in a high-level meeting saying, ‘Indoor venues must be well-ventilated, and also let’s close the great outdoors and wide open spaces.’
I have already written about why the hotspot lockdown measures are blunt instruments that will have minimal impact on the progression of the pandemic, but will have a very destructive impact on the economy.
Now, these same measures have been extended to the Sarah Baartman District Municipality surrounding the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, which includes Jeffrey’s Bay and Port Alfred, and the Garden Route District Municipality, which extends from Stormsriver to beyond Stilbaai.
One of these measures is to close all beaches and public parks. This will have a number of consequences, none of them (officially, at least) intended.
Instead of spending time in the great outdoors, which is by far and away the safest place to be, people will now be pushed towards indoor environments, like restaurants, bars, shopping malls and individual homes. People who would otherwise go to parks or beaches have to go somewhere, and wherever they go, they will increase crowding, which is the exact opposite of what a smart Covid-19 policy should do.
Who thought this was a good idea?
A review of available studies on the outdoor transmission of Covid-19 concluded that outside of crowded gatherings, ‘the outdoor environment presents a low risk of transmission of Covid-19 due to the natural social distancing that happens through the normal conventions of personal space in everyday life’.
It cites a database of case reports maintained by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine which found that of the 20 471 cases under review, only 461 in 11 clusters, or 2.3% were associated with outdoor environments. The vast majority of these involved crowding, such as rallies, markets, and music or sports events. A Chinese study of 7 324 cases found only a single transmission incident involving two people that took place in an outdoor environment.
Accelerating the spread
Without a shadow of a doubt, it is many times safer to be in a park or on a beach than be indoors with limited ventilation and only 1.5-metre social distancing.
There is an argument to be made for closing beaches that are prone to overcrowding in metropolitan areas, but it makes absolutely no sense to close sparsely populated beaches outside major cities.
In the Garden Route, even in season, very few beaches are overly busy, and even those are rarely crowded enough to present a serious risk of coronavirus transmission. The handful that are busy could, with the cooperation of local establishments and municipalities, easily have been subjected to adequate safety measures.
Ramaphosa bragged about his ‘differentiated approach’, yet he treated all beaches from Port Alfred to Stilbaai as if they were like Durban’s Golden Mile. That is simply preposterous.
Even the decision to close Durban’s beaches only on certain days is perplexing. This will just compress the crowds into the fewer remaining days, again resulting in more overcrowding, not less.
By driving people towards indoor entertainment, the government’s park and beach closure policy will accelerate the spread of Covid-19, not inhibit it, just as the original hard lockdown did around April.
Being outdoors
Spending time outdoors is well-documented as having positive mental health benefits. Among them are ‘significant reductions in stress and anxiety after time spent in nature, as well as increased positive affect, or elevated mood’.
Ramaphosa actually made my wife cry. ‘Have I not been through enough?’ she asked.
For context, she is the frontline Covid testing nurse at a government hospital on the Garden Route. We are therefore acutely aware of the pressure the healthcare system is under, and my wife bears a great deal of that pressure. She doesn’t believe the measures Ramaphosa announced will in any way alleviate that pressure.
We have both been isolating since the second wave began in early November, as a precaution against her getting infected. We will not be attending family gatherings, or socialising, at all, this season.
As a nurse, my wife risks her own life to deal with high numbers of fearful, angry, dying and even dead patients. After a rough day on her feet, much of it spent working outdoors in the sun to minimise coronavirus transmission risk, she can’t go and visit friends or have a drink. The only thing that keeps her sane is to put her feet in the sea and watch the sun set after work.
On our wide, expansive beaches, social distancing doesn’t mean 1.5 metres. Here, even in season, you’re typically beyond shouting distance from your nearest neighbour. Now that last sliver of relaxation has been taken away from our overworked and stressed healthcare workers, and for no good reason.
Economic devastation
Papa Cyril, with his patronising ‘family meetings’ at which nobody can talk back, has done much more damage than just that.
He claims that Covid-19 transmission during the festive season ‘poses the greatest threat … to the recovery of our economy’. Then he promptly introduces measures that will wipe out tourism during the festive season, upon which the entire economies of the Garden Route and the coastal towns in Sarah Baartman District depend.
You can’t claim to worry about the recovery of the economy while you cut its throat, Mr President! What is this, some sort of humane slaughter ritual?
Following Ramaphosa’s shock announcement, a contributor to the local Knysna-Plett Herald, Elaine King, wrote a piece for News24 reporting mass cancellations by holidaymakers on the Garden Route.
‘Disastrous. Absolutely disastrous,’ she quoted Colleen Harding of the Knysna Accommodation Association as saying. ‘There have been mass cancellations since last night’s announcement – up to 80 percent of bookings across the board from Airbnb to bed and breakfasts and guest houses. This will kill us [Knysna] and I don’t even know how we will recover.’
Plettenberg Bay’s CEO for Tourism, Patty Butterworth, told News24 that the town’s tourism sector stood to lose another R200 million, on top of the R48 million it already lost to the cancellation of the Plett Rage event.
On Tuesday morning, an email from the executive mayor of the Garden Route District Municipality, Memory Booysen, read: ‘Indeed we will petition National Government, we just had a meeting this morning with all Mayors, Municipal Managers within the Garden Route and special guests ie SanParks, Cape Nature, NPA, Health, SAPS, Department of Local Government etc to discuss the consequences of the President announcement. We are all in agreement that it was irrational.’
That absolutely nobody in the region is in favour of this regulation does not in itself make the rule irrational. What makes it irrational is that it will not achieve any rational objective. In legal terms, the law is not rationally connected to the legitimate government purpose for which it is passed.
Court action
The very day after the announcement, the Great Brak Business Forum, alongside the chairperson of the Mossel Bay Guesthouse Guild and supported by Afriforum, launched an urgent court action against the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, in her capacity as chair of the National Coronavirus Command Council, the Minister of Health, Zweli Mkhize, and the Premier of the Western Cape, Alan Winde.
The goal is to have the beach and park closures declared to be an unconstitutional limitation of the rights of the businesses and people of the district.
It makes the case that the risk of coronavirus transmission is considerably lower outdoors than indoors, citing in support of this claim a paper which concludes that indoor transmission is 18.7 times as likely as outdoor transmission.
‘The industry is inextricably linked to beachgoers,’ the founding affidavit reads, ‘and to deny the main pillar of the tourism industry in the Garden Route is to stifle or indeed thoroughly throttle the tourism, travel and accommodation industry and economy as a whole.’
It warns of disastrous socio-economic consequences, including the closure of many of the remaining tourism businesses, with the concomitant unemployment that would cause, and the ripple effect that would have on the rest of the local economy.
Having compiled an 82-page founding affidavit in less than 24 hours, the applicants urge the court to consider the matter to be urgent, and to grant interim relief should the respondents seek to delay the matter in any way.
Still, it is unlikely that this action will be heard in time to save the holiday tourist season, and much of the damage has already been done.
The Democratic Alliance, which governs the Western Cape, has also threatened legal action should the decision not be reversed post-haste. Again, this would probably be too little too late.
Hidden motive?
If absolutely everyone was opposed to the decision to close the parks and beaches in hotspots, and it won’t curb the spread of the coronavirus, one has to wonder why the national government did so.
One plausible motive is that preventing holidaymakers from coming to the coast in the first place was actually its real intention. But if that is so, Ramaphosa should have said so.
You can’t have ‘family meetings’ and then lie to the family about what your real intentions are. (Mind you, Ramaphosa has been cavalier with the nation’s trust from the outset, so perhaps he thinks treating citizens as dupes is no biggie.)
Another motive could be that closing urban beaches while leaving extra-urban beaches open might give the impression of racial favouritism.
Witness this tweet by someone who helpfully labels herself ‘Marxist’ (but acts decidedly capitalist online): ‘#cyrilramaphosa has closed all beaches where majority of black people go to and all beaches where most white people go to remain open’.
This is a bogus argument. If the criterion is crowd density, no further explanation is necessary. Besides, there are plenty black and coloured people on the beaches in the Garden Route, Eastern Cape and Kwazulu-Natal. They enjoy them every bit as much as white people do.
More importantly, avoiding a misguided perception of racial bias does not justify maximising the economic carnage.
Either way, the regulation closing beaches and parks must be challengeable on rationality grounds. If Ramaphosa’s intention was to curb the spread of Covid-19, the closures will not help, but actually make things worse. If his intention was anything else, then he wasn’t honest about the purpose for which the regulation was passed.
What government should do
Instead of destroying the economy, the government ought to focus its efforts on improving the capacity of healthcare facilities in hotspots. This would involve not only increasing the number of beds, oxygen points and related supplies, but also actively training more healthcare workers, recruiting staff from provinces that are under less pressure, and deputising medics from the military services.
Instead of a standing army of violent bullies enforcing lockdown regulations, why don’t we have a standing army of healthcare professionals for when pandemics strike, as they inevitably will?
If the government had used the nearly 11 months since the pandemic was declared to adequately prepare the healthcare system, there wouldn’t be a crisis in the first place, so the bluntness of the government’s tools would be a moot point.
The decision to close extra-urban beaches and parks takes the cake for the most arbitrary, irrational and damaging regulation to date. It will accelerate the spread of Covid-19, and reward the surviving victims of lockdown in the tourism business by cutting their throats.
Much of the damage has already been done, but this stupid, stupid decision must be reversed without delay.
Have we really come to the point in our democracy where the people have to get on their knees to beg the king for mercy?
[Picture: Maxime Brugel on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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