Covid-19 in South Africa: Which approach should we take now? - The trick to tackling Covid-19 at this stage is to be adaptive. The government’s one-size-fits-all approach is broken; we need to be more flexible. But we should not throw away hard-won lessons
Do we carry on as before, or, like the Swedes. in the early days, take the whole thing very lightly?
An oddity of the way Covid-19 evolution has progressed is that, instead of variations from a single source, variants have emerged unrelated to other variants of concern. Omicron, for example, according to genomic evidence, is not derived from Delta. That has also confounded the view that a relatively simple strategy would thwart it.
This is a very complex subject, but the simple message is: antibodies are the first line of defence. If they work well, they prevent the infection from taking hold; if they don’t, T cells can still stop disease from progressing. This is one reason that despite Omicron spreading like wildfire, the rate of serious illness and death was much lower than before — previous infection and vaccination have trained T-cells well enough to react even if antibodies were not up to the task.
It’s important to distinguish between natural limiting factors like growing community resistance, and temporary counter-measures like distancing and masking. The latter fake the effect of a less contagious disease but if you relax them,What makes the whole picture more complex is the mix of different types of immunity — infection derived from more than one variant and various vaccines.
The risk with lifting restrictions that are easy to implement and not especially irksome — yet which require widespread individual compliance — is that it is hard to bring them back.Temperature screening is mostly pointless. Someone with a high fever should know they are ill and many thermometers are inaccurate or poorly used. At one location, my temperature was regularly recorded as 26°C. If that was correct, I would be dead or a reptile.
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