Inside Covid-19: Lessons for SA from NY on what NOT to do; Tech savvy ways to work from home; Keeping oldies safe. Ep 53

In Episode 53 of Inside Covid-19, some surprising results of the swing to working from home as previously resistant older people are taking to tech as never before; we revisit the growing scandal around SA insurers refusing to honour Business Interruption cover with the owner of an 81-year-old Drakensberg resort; SA can learn from a Seattle old age home on how to keep elderly patients safe; and a quite brilliant expose from our partners at the Wall Street Journal who have been digging deeply into what happened in New York, providing a case book of what NOT to do when dealing with a novel coronavirus. – Alec Hogg

In today’s Covid-19 headlines:

• The South African coronavirus curve continues to rise exponentially with new daily infections breaking above 7,000 for the first time on Saturday. The World Health Organisation reported on Sunday that the 189,000 new cases of the previous 24 hours were a new record with South Africa among several countries at new peaks. SA’s new daily infections are now in the global top five, alongside Russia and surpassed only by the far more populous USA, which is now into a distinct second wave, Brazil and India. While the rate of growth is of concern, South Africa’s total cases of 140,000 and mortalities of 2,500 are still well behind the hardest hit nations. The US has had just under 130,000 deaths from 2.6m confirmed infections. In Brazil, 57,000 people have succumbed to the virus with a total of 1.35m cases. The UK, which appears to now have the virus under control with a modest 36 deaths yesterday, is still third on the global list with 43,550 mortalities from 311,000 cases.
• It’s not only in the USA where societal fault lines have been prized open by Covid-19. Brazilian activists erected a thousand crosses in front of the Brazilian parliament to represent the people who have died, an indictment on a political leadership which initially wrote off the pandemic as a bad flu.
• The Covid-19 inspired lockdowns and social distancing regulations has seen millions of people working on their computers from home. As you’ll hear in this fascinating discussion with Discovery’s Chief Technology Officer Derek Wilcocks and the group’s chief information security officer Zaid Parak, it was a huge logistical exercise – but also with a dark side for those who do not protect themselves against criminals who have spotted a new cyber crime opportunity.