South Africa has worsening epidemic despite lockdown – Wits Prof Alex van den Heever

The government has been praised by the World Health Organisation and many governments for its swift clampdown in containing the novel coronavirus. Prof Alex van den Heever, the Chair in Social Security at Wits University however believes the effect of the lockdown has been limited as the reproduction rate of the disease has not come down enough. Prof van den Heever says that South Africa has a worsening epidemic despite the lockdown. He told Linda van Tilburg what the government could do to stay ahead of the disease.

I certainly don't like the term flatten the curve. Essentially what the objective of public health interventions aim is, is to reduce the reproduction rate of the disease below 1, as the disease will wipe itself out after a period of time because it's infecting fewer and fewer people. People are still infecting others but at a declining rate. If we have public health interventions of any form that still retain a reproduction rate above 1, then there's a problem because the infections are slowly increasing in society and potentially we run the risk of falling behind the curve. It's very important in an epidemic like this that you don't chase the disease. You've got to get ahead of it. The introduction of the lockdown in many other countries has reduced the reproduction rate of the disease. We introduced the lockdown at a time when our number of new infections was relatively low. Therefore one would expect a very quick result in bringing the epidemic into control and showing a decline to almost zero. Certainly after the period of time in which we've had it, you wouldn't have seen that in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain or the US where the epidemic got ahead of the governments. In South Africa we introduced it as an early stage of the epidemic, however we are seeing new increases in infections, which means that the reproduction rate of the epidemic that we are seeing publicly, is above 1. This is inconsistent with the expectation from a lockdown, in my view. It talks to the fact that we are not targeted enough and we haven't introduced effective public health interventions that are sensitive to our local context. As a consequence we have a worsening epidemic despite the fact we've had a very damaging lockdown.

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