HOPE-SPOTTING: In numbers: Five spots of Covid-19 hope (Caution: There’s a ‘But’) By Ferial Haffajee
The hard lockdown has worked. The draconian Level 5 lockdown has kept South Africa’s case numbers at a level that places it among the countries with the lowest caseloads, as this chart shows. It’s from a presentation that Health Minister Zweli Mkhize made to Parliament’s health committee on April 27.But, Dr Adrian Puren of the National Institute of Communicable Diseases warns that, “We are in the amplification stage of the pandemic that requires control and mitigation.
“The curve has flattened rather than exploded to exponential growth. So the reproductive number [of the virus] has certainly decreased but we do not have relevant information that the ‘R Nought’ [scientific term for the rate of replication of the virus] has been fully met,” says Puren. He adds that non-peer-reviewed studies suggest a slow replication which could explain the careful lowering of lockdown levels.
Puren says a recent scenario being used in South Africa is that testing needs to be at least equivalent to South Korea . At best, it must be equivalent to testing in Germany . Mkhize said 5.8 million people had been screened by April 23 and 41,000 of those had been referred for testing. The NHLS says test turnaround times are getting faster.
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