South Africans will feel more than a little hard done by this weekend, as governments around the world halt all air travel with us and we take on the unwanted mantle of global Covid pariah.
Like dominoes falling, they have followed the lead of the UK in stopping flights to and from SA in reaction to the discovery of the new Omicron Covid-19 strain that is possibly more transmissible and deadly than the variants that preceded it.
It’s a harsh blow for SA. Perhaps the worst thing we could do now is compound the problem with tough new lockdown measures that would almost certainly kill off any hope of our modest economic recovery succeeding.
There will be those who argue that it is precisely the skill and expertise of our scientists, and our transparent and open approach to sharing information on the disease, that have landed us in this trouble.
The excellent work done by our scientists in studying the virus, announced to the world on Thursday, is being seen as a strategic misstep, with some arguing that we should have waited until we knew more about the new variant before going public. In part, though, there appears to be a misunderstanding of how SA’s scientists were able to so quickly identify and analyse the new variant.
It seems the variant was first noted by British scientists from a sample taken from a person who travelled from SA to Hong Kong; SA scientists were then able to confirm that the variant was circulating in Botswana and the rest of Southern Africa.
The idea that we could have stayed silent, and sat on our knowledge of the variant, is fanciful.
In any event, SA has emerged as a centre of excellence for its scientific prowess and our contribution to the pool of knowledge in respect of Covid-19 has been immense and acknowledged. There can be no retreat into an anti-science laager.
Travel bans? Even the World Health Organisation criticised this punitive move
That said, the sequence of events got some people, including health minister Joe Phaahla, wondering aloud whether we are being punished for our transparency. The fact is that Covid-19 is a global problem and SA cannot hide its knowledge in the unlikely hope that the facts will stay hidden.
What does stick in the craw, though, is knowing that after so generously and open-mindedly sharing our knowledge with British scientists, the UK imposed a travel ban and placed us on its so-called red list without bothering to tell us first.
It is likely the UK does not want to be caught napping, as it was by the Delta variant, and is determined not to let it happen again.
But travel bans? Even the World Health Organisation criticised this punitive move, and given that the new variant is likely to have spread far and wide already, to ban travel is to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. Let’s hope the UK, and much of the rest of the world, sees it our way, and soon.
The UK and the rest of the developed world will have to realise that their safety depends on the success of a global vaccine programme, and that unless there is to be global apartheid on a grand scale, they are going to have to do more to ensure that everyone gets vaccinated, rich and poor.
Similarly, the rate of vaccination in SA hasn’t reached anything like the levels we had hoped for — and been promised — and a new effort has to go into vaccinating all our people. Instead of lockdowns, that’s where President Cyril Ramaphosa’s focus should be when he addresses the nation.
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