Image: Daily Maverick
Faizel Patel – 26/03/2021
As South Africa prepares to mark exactly a year since the country entered the COVID-19 hard lockdown on Saturday, Wits University director of vaccines and infectious diseases Professor Shabir Madhi says mass gatherings would lend itself to a resurgence in the pandemic.
It is becoming more clear that South Africa may be moved back to alert level 2 as the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) mulls over increasing numbers for church and religious gatherings over the Easter weekend.
The country is expecting a third wave of coronavirus infections after the long weekend.
Speaking to Radio Islam, Madhi says mass gatherings may influence the magnitude of the Coronavirus resurgence.
“What we do know about the spread of this virus, is that more than 80% of all infections that occur are either directly or indirectly related to mass gatherings, and especially mass gatherings in poorly ventilated indoor spaces. So that it good enough reason to take precaution to avoid this sort of resurgence taking place sooner than later.”
Madhi says South Africans must take precautions against the Coronavirus and despite the low infection rate at the moment, the virus is still rife in the country.
“I am not really a fan of level one, two, three and five. I think those things are fairly meaningless. There needs to be a much more nuanced approach in terms of how we deal with the issues. Now that we know more about quickly this virus spreads under specific conditions, we needed to have a more targeted approach.”
Madhi says it is very difficult to predict the magnitude of the third wave of the Coronavirus.
“A back of the envelope calculation would say that the next wave should be less severe than the second one because of the large percentage of people that have been infected in the country already across the first and second wave. Like I said, the big unknown is whether the virus mutates further and becomes evasive to what should’ve been immunity that induced by bulk infections.”
Madhi says South Africa’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout has been “a complete disaster”, adding that it is one of forty-four countries in the world that has not yet started a mass rollout of vaccines.
Listen to the interview with Professor Shabir Madhi
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