Where else was omicron cooked up if not in the ranks of the unmasked, undistanced, uncaring, uncivilised antivaxxers?
Telford Vice | Cape Town
Deep in the doldrums of lockdown last year, when for five weeks South Africans were not allowed to leave their homes to exercise or walk their dogs, we would appear on our balconies and verandahs every evening to applaud healthcare workers.
It was a moment to exhale, to be relieved to have lived another day. But on one of those evenings a particularly cynical Cape Town resident screamed into the crackle of clapping what everyone felt in their souls: “We’re all going to die!”
The story was related around a table in a restaurant on Sunday, where we had gathered to celebrate a mutual friend’s birthday. It was met with hollow levity, like that of all those who dare to look in the eye the trauma they have survived. And who know more harm is in their midst: the uninvited, unwanted guest at the party was omicron.
South Africa recorded no new cases of any variant of Covid-19 on November 14 and 18, and for most of that month the numbers were in the low hundreds. But, on November 23, there were 18,586 new infections. Only once in the first five days of December was the count below 10,000. Twice it topped 16,000.
The positivity rate on Sunday, when we sat and laughed and drank and ate and tried to behave as if all was normal, was 23.8% — almost a quarter of those tested were confirmed to have contracted the disease. Early indications are that most of them will not need a hospital, but we know by now that that can change in a heartbeat. Especially when hearts stop beating. We’re not all going to die, but some of us might.
South Africa’s role in all this is complex. Our scientists told the world of the existence of the new variant, which led, swiftly, to the closing of other countries’ borders to us. And to those countries either prohibiting or making it difficult and expensive for their citizens to travel to our shores and return home. Much the same countries have bought exponentially more doses of vaccine than they need to inoculate their entire population. That has led to claims of geopolitical racism.
It also means the cancellation of South Africa’s summer tourist season for the second consecutive year. In 2018 the holiday industry earned nearly 3% of the country’s gross domestic product and employed around 4.5% of all those who had jobs.
Not that South Africans are blameless in this saga. On Sunday we could see each others’ unmasked faces as we laughed and topped up our drinks. So far, so legal. But on the street outside, mask-wearing seemed to be optional and social distancing was something that we used to do. Both measures remain, officially, mandatory.
But in a society where authority has never been respected — how were we supposed to respect the racist laws that held sway for hundreds of years? — regulations are disregarded with impunity.
We have among the most progressive constitutions in the world, and among the most socially conservative populations. Apartheid was declared dead in 1994, but white supremacy continues to thrive in every significant sense. We have developed some of the most advanced virology in the world because we have been fighting HIV and Aids for decades, but we are beset by roaming mobs of protesting Covid vaccine refuseniks and conspiracy theorists who, shamefully, compare efforts to administer the life-saving jab as widely as possible to the holocaust and apartheid.
Sunday’s happy scene would have been impossible during the more stringent stages of last year’s lockdown, when restaurants and bars were shut. Once reopened they were initially not allowed to sell booze. Despite that, many did. The code was to ask for a glass of grape juice, specifying red or white. A glass of wine would arrive, accompanied by an empty can that once held the correspondingly coloured grape juice.
Not unrelated is that drunk driving is, of course, against the law, but also a deadly national sport: research by road safety and medical experts shows that alcohol can be blamed for 27.1% of traffic deaths. So, along with restaurants and bars, liquor stores were also shuttered for weeks last year. That prompted many to nurture relationships with their friendly neighbourhood bootlegger.
Adalbert Gordon-Ernst, an anaesthetist at Groote Schuur, a major Cape Town hospital made world famous by Christiaan Barnard performing the first successful heart transplant there in December 1967, explained why the booze ban was necessary: “Alcohol went away and there was a dramatic reduction in the amount of trauma cases that we saw. The alcohol ban was lifted, and then this huge wave of trauma hit us. It saturated our system, and we were working with fewer staff dealing with regular surgical emergencies because we were reaching peak numbers of Covid patients that had to be looked after.”
We can’t handle our drink. But we keep drinking too much regardless. And, because of our drunken misadventures, we end up cluttering trauma wards that could be put to better use. Enough of us also can’t handle the truth that the vaccines work, which allows the virus time and space to mutate. Where else was omicron cooked up if not in the ranks of the unmasked, undistanced, uncaring, uncivilised antivaxxers?
If we were honest with ourselves on Sunday, we would have conceded that that’s what we were really afraid of; that the bastards would lock us down again. The National Coronavirus Command Council is meeting as we speak, and tougher restrictions are anticipated. How far can we be from a vaccine mandate?
Only one person succumbed of Covid-19 in South Africa on Sunday. They were 89,966th death claimed by the pandemic in South Africa. That’s one, nevermind 89,966, too many. There will, of course, be far too many more.
We know we’re all going to die of something. But we want to go out on our own terms. And we don’t want to die sober.
First published by News9 Live
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