With SA bracing for an expected fourth wave, Netcare, the country’s third largest private health-care provider, says the best prospect of making Covid a controllable disorder like the flu, with little to no economic disruption, is for a significant slice of the population to get regular vaccinations or boosters.
Speaking after the release of results for the year ended September 30, CEO Richard Friedland said: “The only way we move from a pandemic, which is a situation of chaos, of death and of huge disruption, to a controlled situation, known as an endemic, is if we are able to regularly vaccinate sufficiently high numbers of people. If we move to an endemic situation, that effectively means Covid-19 could eventually become like the normal flu.
“A lot of people objecting are saying, ‘Oh but you told me I only needed one Covid vaccine and now you are saying we need two and maybe boosters.’ Yes, the reality of dealing with a viral infection is that we are going to need regular boosters until we reach high levels of immunity.”
The big problem, said Friedland, is that there are countries, particularly in Africa, that have achieved vaccination levels of only 3%, providing fertile ground for the virus to replicate and potentially mutate.
He said it is “very significant” that, even though being vaccinated won’t necessarily prevent you from getting Covid, it “prevents serious disease and death”.
“I can tell you of the 80 people [with Covid in Netcare hospitals] at the moment, well over 90% are people who are not vaccinated. If we get to sufficiently high levels of vaccination, serious Covid-19 could well become primarily a disease of the unvaccinated few.”
Friedland said the potential severity of a fourth wave, which could hit next month or in January, will depend on whether a new, virulent or highly transmissible strain of the virus emerges. In the absence of this “we think the numbers will be a lot less and that it will be a milder fourth wave”.
“But as Covid has taught us, no-one really knows and this time last year many authoritative sources were pretty confidently saying we have seen off the first wave and we will deal with whatever comes. Little did we know that there was a Beta variant and we struggled for a while to find sufficient critical-care beds in KwaZulu-Natal. And then in June of this year, everybody said the third wave was going to be very mild, but with it came the Delta variant and we again struggled for a while in Gauteng.”
Timeslive meawnhile reported on Thursday the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), had confirmed the detection of new Covid-19 variant known as B.1.1.529 in SA, but its implications are not yet known.
Netcare has opted to not yet make vaccinations mandatory for its staff, with Friedland saying the group wanted “to be able to first try and persuade people, understand what their concerns are, debunk some of the mythology around vaccines and work with our staff to persuade them to take the vaccine”.
The policy of persuasion rather than mandatory vaccination seems to be working. Friedland said more than 85% of the group’s staff have been vaccinated and in some hospitals more than 90% have received shots.
We think the numbers will be a lot less and that it will be a milder fourth wave
— Netcare CEO Richard Friedland
As far as its results are concerned, Netcare, which along with other hospital groups had to stop elective surgeries during the peaks of the pandemic, reported a “stronger performance across all of our key financial metrics as compared to last year”.
Coming off a low base, the results were positively affected by the group being able to better manage Covid in its hospitals, with the proportion of beds occupied by Covid patients falling to 60% and 52% in the second and third waves respectively, compared with 80% in the first wave.
Friedland said the availability of rapid Covid antigen tests has been a “significant enabler” for the group in that they shorten the time to diagnosis and reduce the number of “yellow beds” required. Yellow beds are those reserved for suspected Covid patients, and so-called red beds are for patients who have tested positive.
Compared with 2020, revenue grew 11.5% to R21bn; earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation increased 24.8% to R3.193bn; and adjusted headline EPS rose 107.4% to 67.4c.
Anchor Group CEO Peter Armitage said it is important to “compare everything” with 2019, adding that Netcare has “bounced about 80% of the way back”.
Netcare very good at cutting costs and being efficient and had a high-quality business with good assets and a good market position, but a full recovery, said Armitage, depended on how the pandemic played out.
Protea Asset Management analyst Richard Cheesman said it is a “solid result off a low base” but that, even though the group’s core hospital business has improved, it still had it “quite tough” during the period.
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