How Prof Karim went from doubter to virus fighter

When Prof Salim Abdool Karim received an outbreak alert while hiking in the Drakensberg Mountains during a family vacation, little did he know that weeks later he’d be presenting a strategy to President Cyril Ramaphosa on how to fight the Covid-19 pandemic he had shrugged off.

In an interview with Sowetan this week ahead of the commemoration of the anniversary of the first case of Covid-19 being detected in SA, Karim said he had mistakenly downplayed the virus.     

“I looked at it [the alert] and I thought it was SARS virus and the Chinese know how to deal with it. I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t take it seriously. I had no idea what was going to follow,” said the infectious diseases specialist.

Seven days later, while in his office at the Nelson Mandela Medical School in Durban, a colleague came to his office to show him the virus sequence on Twitter.

“We looked at it and that’s when I realised that this was going to be different. I don’t know why but it looked different. Shortly thereafter our colleagues from CDC (Centre for Disease Control) in China released a statement that there was a human-to-human transmission. By the end of January the WHO [World Health Organisation] declared it a pandemic of international concern,” said Karim.

He then pulled in his team and put a barrier in the middle of his laboratory, converting it for SARS-Covid2 testing even though they did not have a patient to run tests on. The tests would have helped them learn the behaviour of the virus as well its symptoms.  

“We were helped by our colleagues in Beijing. They sent us reagents and we set up the Covid testing. By mid-February we were ready but there are no cases. We started testing on patients that had respiratory diseases, fever and bronchitis. All results came negative,” Karim said.

On March 5, health minister Zweli Mkhize announced that the country had its first confirmed case, a man who was part of a group of 10 who had returned from Italy, which was one of the first countries to be hit by the virus.

“Up until then we were hoping that this virus would bypass us. We were naive. The main thing for me was that we didn’t really know that much about it. There is nobody in SA that studied coronaviruses. Every one of us is not an expert because we never studied Covid, we studied HIV or other viruses.”

Karim said he received a call from Mkhize’s office for a meeting on March 23 where he would be joined by about 50 other scientists. It was in that meeting where the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) was formed.

He was appointed to chair the committee. At the time there were just under 1,000  cases but no deaths.

He was then asked to present a strategy to parliament, the president and later to the public.

“This caused some confusion and it’s my fault, I caused it. People started thinking that the scientists knew what was going on and that we were in charge. We are not in charge, we just advise. The politicians make all the decisions. It has nothing to do with us. Our job is to look at the evidence, science and produce the best information we can. We are not in charge of anything,” Karim said.

One cause of the confusion, he admitted, was a claim that those who got infected would be not be reinfected. He also conceded that the closing of borders was irrational.