Get the 99.5% that won’t die back to work – UCT medical students of ’93

The calls for government to lift the lockdown, even if it is just partial, have been growing louder. Recently, it came from an informal sector expert GG Alcock who told the stories of the street traders who were initially banned from buying from markets and later allowed to sell cold food like vegetables, but were still suffering. And Dr Theuns Eloff who said the lockdown can lead to deaths if GDP plunges; to name but a few. And now medical students from the University of Cape Town have added their voices to calls for the lockdown to be relieved. Speaking for the group to Alec Hogg, Dr Fred Tyler said "even before the pandemic, more people died from poverty than from normal flu." His fear is not that people will die of the coronavirus but from poverty. President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced an extraordinary budget of R500bn to deal with poverty and hunger during the lockdown and said he will review the restrictions and announce a decision tomorrow. What many people are asking of the President is not to give them food or handouts; they want to be allowed to work so that they can feed their families. – Linda van Tilburg

University of Cape Town medical students who graduated in 1993 are obviously a pretty close group. They have put together an open letter to the president of South Africa (published below) outlining what they believe should be done. Amongst the ideas or intentions is to remove the lockdown immediately. The spokesman for the group Dr. Fred Tyler.

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