How world sees SA: Mass screening by community angels stems Covid-19

South Africans may be griping about their cigarettes and booze during the lockdown, but in the outside world, the country and President Cyril Ramaphosa are seen as a beacon of light in the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike many Western leaders who saw what happened in China and Italy, Ramaphosa used the experience of these countries where health systems battled to deal with the outbreak, to model an early response to the virus. The Financial Times' Joseph Cotterill has highlighted South Africa's other defence mechanism against Covid-19: the community health workers who have been working for years with tuberculosis and HIV-patients and have been so successful to test and trace positive cases of Covid-19. What Cotterill also picked up, is that South Africa has another weapon in its arsenal to fight Covid-19. While other countries ask their citizens to opt-in to smartphone tracing, South Africa "already has the power to access data from mobile phone companies on the movements of possible coronavirus contacts". – Linda van Tilburg

By Thulasizwe Sithole

South Africa has deployed a number of measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus which included mass screening, target testing and what the Financial Times calls a "draconian lockdown" in the early stages of the pandemic. Without this, Joseph Cotterill writes, the virus "threatened to overwhelm the country if left unchecked in densely populated townships".

___STEADY_PAYWALL___