The other day in Pretoria, South Africa, a German expatriate
told me about an entire classroom of kids at a private international school who
came down with Covid over a three-day period. One of my work colleagues, whose
only known risk was grocery shopping in a mask, had to skip Zoom meetings
because the virus knocked her flat.
Graphs of the latest Covid surge in South Africa have been close to
vertical, and the culprit is clear: Within a few weeks, the omicron variant
has gone from less than 1 percent of cases to more than 90
percent. In Gauteng province, where I live, 1 in 500 people is currently infected
with omicron. Given how many asymptomatic cases go undetected, the real number
is probably closer to 1 in 50.
With such numbers, contact tracing and quarantines
become all but meaningless. Even the individual goal of avoiding infection
comes to seem quixotic. Therefore, rather than trying to suppress omicron, the South
African government is now assuming, essentially, that everyone will get this
virus. Although the country retains some mild restrictions on indoor and
outdoor gatherings, unmasked diners fill restaurants. Shift workers throw down
after-work pints in informal taverns.
According to Shabir
Mahdi, the University of the Witwatersrand’s dean of public health and a
former member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19,
the president’s Cabinet will likely consider additional preventive restrictions
only if a health system collapse seems imminent. That is, the government’s priority
this time around is to try to avoid economic losses—or, as President Cyril Ramaphosa
put
it in a recent address to the nation, “to manage this pandemic, to resume
many of our daily activities, and to rebuild our economy.” Officials see vulnerability
to hunger and unemployment as greater threats than Covid, given that an estimated
60-70 percent of South Africans have prior immunity, either from
vaccination or prior infection.
The government also learned from earlier Covid waves, says
Mahdi, that even the harshest lockdowns didn’t achieve the desired impact in a
country where so many people live in crowded apartment buildings, houses, or
shantytowns. And then there’s the specter of last July’s uprising, in which
thousands of desperate people looted malls and supermarkets, a warning signal
to the authorities about the dangers of severe public-health restrictions.
Perhaps lockdowns are futile with a variant so infectious—around
three times more so than Delta, early estimates suggest—that
you can acquire it on a five-minute grocery shopping trip. Maybe mass infection
really is the lesser evil facing the country. But, like the Swedish
government’s “herd immunity” policy at the beginning of the pandemic, the South
African government’s current omicron strategy is a potentially fatal
gamble.
There has been a surge in national pride in South Africa despite
the devastation caused by the pandemic. The sense here is that omicron may not have even originated
in Southern Africa, but that our world-class scientists and research
institutes, with decades of
experience monitoring HIV and tuberculosis, were especially skilled detecting
pathogen mutations. South Africans are also proud of our scientists’
independence from government (especially in comparison with, say, Wuhan, China).
But there’s also the widespread feeling that South Africa is
being punished for its scientific advances and honesty. On Twitter, Facebook,
and TikTok, as well as around neighborhood braais or shisanyamas, the
barbecues that most South Africans attend several times a week during the warm
months, talk focuses less on the threat of omicron than the West’s recent, discriminatory
travel bans on travelers from southern Africa. As with many developing
countries, the South African economy relies heavily on tourism. With under-25
unemployment at 75
percent, and suffering from mass pandemic-related poverty, South Africa can ill afford the
large-scale, high-season tourist cancellations that have followed the bans.
Tulio de Oliviera, who led the team of South African
scientists who alerted the world to omicron, has become a national hero of
sorts—and a strong voice against the bans, tweeting, for example, that “SA has leading T-cell
immunologists who [cannot] get reagents [because of] the silly travel ban.”
President Ramaphosa has also won praise for a recent series
of speeches in which he condemned aforementioned bans as
“unscientific,” “arbitrary,” and “colonial” (“unscientific” because it is
ineffective to ban travel from a single region when a virus is present
in most of the world; “arbitrary” and “colonial” because the bans targeted
African countries with very little community spread, like Mozambique, while
exempting European ones with major Omicron pandemics, like Britain and the Netherlands).
On the flip side, the rogues’ gallery is led by the
government of liberal, multicultural Canada, which, in addition to banning
southern African visitors, spent a week refusing to recognize PCR tests performed in countries
like South Africa and Botswana. Of course, as South Africans pointed out, the only reason Canada even knew of omicron’s
existence was because of the very PCR tests deemed by Ottawa to be substandard.
But there is enmity to spare for the West in general for vaccine hoarding, which is seen as just the latest
example of a centuries-long disregard for African lives.
And yet, South Africa’s legitimate outrage at the West can
seem, at times, to manifest as a collective thumbing of the nose at Covid
itself. That’s worrying. In a country where almost six million people over 60
will not be eligible for booster shots until late January, a laissez faire
policy amounts to a bet that omicron will not be able to evade old people’s
presumably waning T-cells. It is also a wager that whatever long-Covid
disabilities result from mass infection will be less costly to the country than
lockdown-related suffering. The results of these decisions will only become
clear in the coming weeks, as enough time passes to begin to measure deaths,
hospitalizations, and long-term disabilities.
A nation of guinea pigs, South Africa can only hope that omicron
turns out to be milder than its predecessors. And we can only ask that public
health decisions going forward be taken with a view to ordinary citizens’ well being,
rather than political optics in the wake of a travel ban that was itself
largely motivated by politics. One sure way to intensify the damage
of the bans would be to overcompensate and protect South African livelihoods at
the expense of South African lives.
Whatever happens, those of you in the West who have been
watching South Africa the past few weeks are about to be as flabbergasted as we
are.
The other day in Pretoria, South Africa, a German expatriate told me about an entire classroom of kids at a private international school who came down with Covid over a three-day period. One of my work colleagues, whose only known risk was grocery shopping in a mask, had to skip Zoom meetings because the virus knocked her flat.Graphs of the latest Covid surge in South Africa have been close to vertical, and the culprit is clear: Within a few weeks, the omicron variant has gone from less than 1 percent of cases to more than 90 percent. In Gauteng province, where I live, 1 in 500 people is currently infected with omicron. Given how many asymptomatic cases go undetected, the real number is probably closer to 1 in 50. With such numbers, contact tracing and quarantines become all but meaningless. Even the individual goal of avoiding infection comes to seem quixotic. Therefore, rather than trying to suppress omicron, the South African government is now assuming, essentially, that everyone will get this virus. Although the country retains some mild restrictions on indoor and outdoor gatherings, unmasked diners fill restaurants. Shift workers throw down after-work pints in informal taverns.According to Shabir Mahdi, the University of the Witwatersrand’s dean of public health and a former member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19, the president’s Cabinet will likely consider additional preventive restrictions only if a health system collapse seems imminent. That is, the government’s priority this time around is to try to avoid economic losses—or, as President Cyril Ramaphosa put it in a recent address to the nation, “to manage this pandemic, to resume many of our daily activities, and to rebuild our economy.” Officials see vulnerability to hunger and unemployment as greater threats than Covid, given that an estimated 60-70 percent of South Africans have prior immunity, either from vaccination or prior infection.The government also learned from earlier Covid waves, says Mahdi, that even the harshest lockdowns didn’t achieve the desired impact in a country where so many people live in crowded apartment buildings, houses, or shantytowns. And then there’s the specter of last July’s uprising, in which thousands of desperate people looted malls and supermarkets, a warning signal to the authorities about the dangers of severe public-health restrictions.Perhaps lockdowns are futile with a variant so infectious—around three times more so than Delta, early estimates suggest—that you can acquire it on a five-minute grocery shopping trip. Maybe mass infection really is the lesser evil facing the country. But, like the Swedish government’s “herd immunity” policy at the beginning of the pandemic, the South African government’s current omicron strategy is a potentially fatal gamble. There has been a surge in national pride in South Africa despite the devastation caused by the pandemic. The sense here is that omicron may not have even originated in Southern Africa, but that our world-class scientists and research institutes, with decades of experience monitoring HIV and tuberculosis, were especially skilled detecting pathogen mutations. South Africans are also proud of our scientists’ independence from government (especially in comparison with, say, Wuhan, China).But there’s also the widespread feeling that South Africa is being punished for its scientific advances and honesty. On Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok, as well as around neighborhood braais or shisanyamas, the barbecues that most South Africans attend several times a week during the warm months, talk focuses less on the threat of omicron than the West’s recent, discriminatory travel bans on travelers from southern Africa. As with many developing countries, the South African economy relies heavily on tourism. With under-25 unemployment at 75 percent, and suffering from mass pandemic-related poverty, South Africa can ill afford the large-scale, high-season tourist cancellations that have followed the bans. Tulio de Oliviera, who led the team of South African scientists who alerted the world to omicron, has become a national hero of sorts—and a strong voice against the bans, tweeting, for example, that “SA has leading T-cell immunologists who [cannot] get reagents [because of] the silly travel ban.”President Ramaphosa has also won praise for a recent series of speeches in which he condemned aforementioned bans as “unscientific,” “arbitrary,” and “colonial” (“unscientific” because it is ineffective to ban travel from a single region when a virus is present in most of the world; “arbitrary” and “colonial” because the bans targeted African countries with very little community spread, like Mozambique, while exempting European ones with major Omicron pandemics, like Britain and the Netherlands).On the flip side, the rogues’ gallery is led by the government of liberal, multicultural Canada, which, in addition to banning southern African visitors, spent a week refusing to recognize PCR tests performed in countries like South Africa and Botswana. Of course, as South Africans pointed out, the only reason Canada even knew of omicron’s existence was because of the very PCR tests deemed by Ottawa to be substandard. But there is enmity to spare for the West in general for vaccine hoarding, which is seen as just the latest example of a centuries-long disregard for African lives.And yet, South Africa’s legitimate outrage at the West can seem, at times, to manifest as a collective thumbing of the nose at Covid itself. That’s worrying. In a country where almost six million people over 60 will not be eligible for booster shots until late January, a laissez faire policy amounts to a bet that omicron will not be able to evade old people’s presumably waning T-cells. It is also a wager that whatever long-Covid disabilities result from mass infection will be less costly to the country than lockdown-related suffering. The results of these decisions will only become clear in the coming weeks, as enough time passes to begin to measure deaths, hospitalizations, and long-term disabilities.A nation of guinea pigs, South Africa can only hope that omicron turns out to be milder than its predecessors. And we can only ask that public health decisions going forward be taken with a view to ordinary citizens’ well being, rather than political optics in the wake of a travel ban that was itself largely motivated by politics. One sure way to intensify the damage of the bans would be to overcompensate and protect South African livelihoods at the expense of South African lives. Whatever happens, those of you in the West who have been watching South Africa the past few weeks are about to be as flabbergasted as we are.