Faizel Patel – 01/03/2021
University of Johannesburg professor and political analyst Steven Friedman says he is concerned about the health of South Africans emphasising that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s family meeting continues a disaster, which is being ignored.
The president on Sunday announced that the country is easing to lockdown level one.
Ramaphosa reiterated that the wearing of masks are mandatory and social distancing remain in place.
Friedman says while there is a continuous relaxation of COVID-19 protocols, there is no substitute to replace the restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.
“You can relax restrictions if you have a solid testing and tracing system in place. Unless you can do that, you are just in the cycle in which restrictions gets relaxed, there’s no effective protection in place and then you have a third wave, a fourth wave and a fifth wave. We don’t learn and quite frankly the reason we don’t learn is that there’s no pressure on government to actually make combatting the virus work effectively.”
Friedman says while the Coronavirus vaccine may be effective in combatting the virus, it needs to be rolled out to people.
“We have this very complicated vaccines strategy, we have everything imaginable to do with vaccines and we don’t have vaccines. The only vaccines we have are the Johnson and Johnson vaccines, which are actually getting advertised as a rollout. It’s not a rollout; it’s actually a clinical trial. It hasn’t been approved for use, so the health workers who are getting it are actually participants in clinical trial.”
Friedman says that while vaccines may assist South Africa in battling the pandemic, the country cannot ease restrictions, adding that Ramaphosa mentioned that the “rollout” to health workers extends to the end of April and “an awful lot of damage to human beings can be caused in two months.”
Listen to the interview with Professor Steven Friedman
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