The government has admitted to holding back information from the public on the Covid-19 pandemic, saying it is doing so to avoid panic.
With infection rates soaring this week and poor people starving because they cannot work, the president and the national command council face decisions that will affect many lives.
A swift move to level 2 would reduce the contraction to 10% and cut the number of formal sector jobs at risk from 2-million to less than half that. At level 2, 97% of the workforce is allowed to work. "Public disclosure enables people to make their own decisions in regard to their personal prevention strategies."
An early model, produced by National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis , which predicted between 87,900 and 351,000 deaths if the government did nothing to stop the spread, was widely criticised. The NICD's Dr Harry Moultrie said this week that the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic is not cast in stone, because of the state's risk-adjusted strategy.
"We have a robust mathematical apparatus with which we can estimate the level of the spread with each level of lockdown."
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