OPINION | SA's lockdown: don?t be blinded by blue-sky fantasies

Thu, 24 Sep 2020

OPINION | SA's lockdown: don?t be blinded by blue-sky fantasies

News24
08 Aug 2020, 06:13 GMT+10

testing rates. Perhaps most importantly, 50 people died in police custody or as a result of security force action in the first six weeks of the lockdown as "irrational" laws were brutally enforced, part of the "world's worst" argument that Verwoerd conveniently ignores.

The example of Vietnam

We should have stopped the lockdown after three weeks because it was killing jobs, which will reduce life expectancy for a generation, and killing people, because lockdown was doing nothing legible to delay viral spread - in contrast to the fact that the pre-lockdown "Call Up" option of voluntary non-pharmaceutical interventions that worked in the Far East looked to be working here too.

Corrupt, incompetent, innumerate maladministration is lethal. So is flattery of same. But as a last resort lockdown apologists will insist we did poorly just because we are poor.

They should look to Vietnam, which had a hard lockdown for only three weeks, and "never had a total national lockdown, but swooped in on emerging clusters". Vietnam still has zero coronavirus deaths.

Verwoerd would have you believe that the disaster in South Africa has nothing to do with government. "We have to accept and continue to remember," she writes, "that the hardship we are experiencing is because of the virus and not government actions."

The only way you can believe that is by singing Ramagloria and ignoring everything else.

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