Government needs to take drastic action to avoid the country reaching a tipping point of 100 locally acquired cases, according to a team of researchers at Wits university
At issue now is whether to impose a staged lockdown, including tighter measures on the movement of people, such as restrictions on public transport and a ban on domestic travel ahead of the Easter weekend.The Wits group has also modelled the impact of containment measures, drawing on the experience of several European countries, and found that the growth in the epidemic could be slowed significantly.
"The spread of the virus is exponential without containment. With containment it becomes close to linear," said Wits professor Bruce Mellado, who is also a senior researcher at iThemba LABS. Mellado said that the latest modelling work indicated the measures imposed in countries such as France, Italy and Spain had borne fruit, as their initially exponential growth in new infections slowed to a more linear trajectory after they imposed restrictions on people’s movement."These results are very encouraging in that the situation would be much worse without the containment measures," he said.
"The epidemic is likely to be over in several months, but the economic impact will last for another two to three years."
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