The joke’s on us, South Africa. The cruel logic of Omicron travel bans — debunked

Last week, on a late afternoon, panic consumed Tulio de Oliveira, who led the team of South African scientists that identified the new Omicron Covid variant in the county two weeks ago.  

He was rapidly running out of reagents, the chemicals needed to sequence genomes of positive test results to identify new cases of the variant.  

South Africa’s new SARS-CoV-2 infections had almost doubled from the previous day (they have since increased 15-fold) and the number of positive test results to analyse were increasing at speed.  

But two days after the announcement of his team’s results, De Oliveira’s means of importing the chemicals which he needed to help his country keep track of the Omicron variant had been blocked by the nations who stock them. 

Because of several Western governments’ travel bans imposed on southern African countries — out of fear that they would bring a new variant into their countries that was in all likelihood already there — the planes that delivered De Oliveira’s essential products became rare.  

The bioinformatician’s team was providing the world with crucial genomic surveillance data, but their hands had now been chopped off. Developed countries had punished them for their ability to identify the new variant exceptionally fast and their government’s willingness — and courage — to almost instantly share the data with the world. 

Wealthy nations such as the US, the UK, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and numerous others, where Omicron has since been identified (in some cases with no links to Africa) didn’t implement travel restrictions against one another; only Africa faces that burden.  

And despite the SA government, scientists and international bodies such as the World Health Organization expressing their outrage about the selective restrictions, labelling them racist, unscientific and counterproductive, not a single high-income country has reversed their bans.  

Instead, to the absolute amazement of SA scientists, governments such as Canada have implied that they don’t trust our Covid tests. Unless they have exemption, the Canadian government announced, citizens who are stuck in South Africa and want to travel back to their country, have to obtain “a pre-departure negative Covid-19 molecular test result in a third country [read: not SA]”.  

Ironically, South Africa has one of the best developed networks for molecular or PCR testing in the world — in all likelihood better than that of Canada — because the same technique is used for HIV viral load testing for which the country, over the past two decades, has developed an exceptionally well-established infrastructure because of its high HIV burden. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, South Africa was therefore able to start with Covid testing much quicker than many other countries.  

Across the Atlantic, France revealed its own set of rules: Only French and EU residents, diplomats and flight crews are allowed to disembark on French soil if a plane passed through a southern African country; regardless of whether those people were exposed to potentially infected people in those countries or not; if they have the correct passport, they can disembark.  

Absurdly, sequencing data from South Africa, published in the journal Nature, shows that Europe was responsible for more than 80% of the early introductions of SARS-CoV-2 infections in South Africa. And although most flights, regardless of which country, were put on hold around the world, including in South Africa, Europe didn’t face any selective restrictions from our government.  

Alas, the type of apartheid that countries such as Canada and France propagate has led to dangerous levels of racialisation and stigmatisation. 

Dangerous, because decades of literature on infectious diseases have repeatedly found that discrimination leads to inequity and inequity drives the spread of disease. Why? Because stigma and discrimination result in reduced uptake of diagnostics such as Covid testing, and prevention methods like vaccines and available treatments. In the case of Covid, that means the increased likelihood that more variants will emerge, which will inevitably spread across the world and could potentially outsmart the protection that previous infection and vaccines offer us against getting infected, falling seriously ill or dying of the disease.  

BBC World last week, for instance, referred to Omicron as the “southern African variant” in live broadcasts, the German newspaper Die Rheinpfalz introduced the variant as “Das Virus Aus Afrika ist bei uns” (The virus from Africa is with us) and the Spanish publication, Tribuna Albaceta, on 28 November published a cartoon of a “South African” boat named Omicron filled with black Africans depicted as viruses, approaching the European shore. 

Bioinformatician Professor Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (Krisp) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. (Photo: Amy Gibbings / News24)