South Africa’s COVID-19 failure the result of trying to emulate the First World via TheCitizen_News
President Cyril Ramaphosa visits the Covid-19 coronavirus treatment facilities at the Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg on April 24, 2020. Picture: Jerome Delay / POOL / AFP
The first reason South Africa has been unable to stem the tide of infections is that its strategy always assumed a severe epidemic was inevitable. It is hard to fight anything if you assume you are bound to lose. This followed advice from South Africa’s medical scientists, almost all of whom embrace this view despite the fact that scientists in other parts of the world have helped to prevent great damage.
The government likes to boast about the large number of tests its many community health workers have conducted. It talks much less about why testing has not stemmed the virus: a bottleneck at the National Health Laboratory Service, which supports provincial and national government health departments.
By contrast, Senegal, a far poorer country, knowing that it had no laboratory service that could have coped, developed a test which cost only $1 and produced results very quickly.
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