With SA edging past the peak of the third wave of Covid-19 infections, experts have warned that despite the government’s fierce interventions, citizens are not yet out of the woods.
President Cyril Ramaphosa eased the country to alert lockdown level 3 on Sunday night, allowing social gatherings, permitting alcohol sales and interprovincial travel for leisure. This after the country’s daily Covid-19 infection rates slowed down in the past two weeks.
“In the last few weeks our vaccination campaign has made huge strides. We are now administering more than 240,000 vaccines every weekday. A month ago, this figure stood at about 100,000 vaccines per weekday. As a result, we have now administered more than 6.3m vaccines, with over 10% of our population having received a vaccine dose,” said Ramaphosa, adding that they aim to increase daily vaccines to 300,000.
Experts said the government needed to upscale its vaccine rollout programme, capacitate hospitals and ensure citizens observe Covid-19 protocols to avert another wave of the virus.
“The lockdown restrictions are also useful because they minimise interaction of people and this method has been used successfully globally,” said World Health Organisation SA representative Dr Owen Kaluwa.
“Testing, infection tracing and proper quarantine methods are also effective. People know what to do but many have become fatigued because the pandemic has been with us for a long time and they don’t enjoy the freedoms they had before Covid-19.”
Kaluwa said the government vaccine rollout has made strides despite the disturbance caused by the looting and protests in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng two weeks ago, which affected the programme.
“The administering of 300,000 daily vaccines is doable, at least judging by the current rate of 250,000 vaccinations. The government just needs to make vaccination centres available across the country and with that I see the government reaching 40% of its population by end of the year and 70% by mid-2022,” said Kaluwa.
He said the unrest that started in KwaZulu-Natal “can have some dire effects as we saw many people converging illegally without wearing masks and we might start seeing infections rising in that province this week”.
Prof Adrian Puren of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases said despite infections subsiding in Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North West, the upward trajectory in the Free State, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal was concerning.
“We are not out of danger yet. As we get out of the third wave we will continue to see more people being hospitalised and dying before we stabilise again,” Puren said.
He said imposing a strict lockdown is a strategy used elsewhere in the world that has proven to be effective in curbing the infection rate.
“Vaccination is a very important tool that we can use to avoid a disastrous fourth wave, which is a possibility when a new variant is detected. If we sustain the 300,000 daily vaccines administered also on weekends, we should achieve the 67% herd immunity [40m vaccinated people] before the end of the year,” said Puren.
On Sunday, Ramaphosa said the country would receive 31m doses of Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines in the next three months while the cohort age group between 18 and 34 years old will start to receive their jabs from September 1.
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