Communities urged to take charge of Covid-19 prevention strategies as ‘brakes come off pandemic’

“The brakes are really off on this pandemic,” associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Cape Town, health and human rights activist Dr Lydia Cairncross said during a webinar organised by the C-19 People’s Coalition urging communities to organise and start advocating for a people-centred approach to fight the coronavirus infections in South Africa.

Highlighting why the profit-centred approach of the government has failed, she has urged communities to organise.

“Communities must start campaigning for policy changes and a shift in power. At a second level we must do everything we can to take care of one another. We must take over the education. We must find ways to shield the elderly and the vulnerable and build community networks.

“We are all frustrated that communities are not part of the current strategy,” she said.

“We are in a difficult moment here. We have more than 80,000 confirmed cases with 1,670 confirmed deaths. Ten weeks ago we were still counting in the tens and then in the hundreds.” 

She said to understand why the government’s strategy is failing it is important to recognise that the pandemic is not happening in a society that is egalitarian, humane and looking after its people.

“Every fault line we knew was exposed by this epidemic.” 

She said while there is no absolute truth about which strategy would be the right one, the problem with the South African strategy is that it is not people-centred.

“We don’t have a people-centred state. Every strategy would have been distorted by the system putting profit before people,” she said.

She said there was near-universal agreement that the initial hard lockdown was the correct strategy.

“But people’s access to food was limited, children were cut off from the school nutrition programme and incredible police brutality surfaced,” she said.

“What needed to happen during the hard lockdown period to make it successful was a mass testing strategy. We failed at that. We didn’t ramp up the number of tests. In fact, the number of tests went down. 

“Our strategy was wasted because testing was not up to scale. Quarantine and isolation programmes were patchy. We still have the disaster of what happened at [the homeless shelter] in Strandfontein. There was no sustained and coordinated attempt to set up a quarantine and isolation centre.”

She said the next driver of the infection was at workplaces. 

“We didn’t have appropriate personal protective equipment or the correct empowering education to go with it – and by that I mean context-specific and involving people.”

“Now we are having this absolutely insane situation. We have a massive testing failure. We have not brought the private sector on board. Facilities should have been merged.

“Going forward, we will need a stronger primary healthcare response, but the bulk of our money is spent on hospital settings at the expense of disease prevention and health promotion.

“Going forward, we need to admit that we have made mistakes. But we need to start working on a collective response. We must advocate for a deal that will see a universal health system response.”