Ramaphosa's tough question: do we risk people dying of Covid-19 or risk them dying of the myriad lethal consequences of deepening poverty?
Those making educated guesses seem to be suggesting that an extension of the lockdown in its current form is more or less impossible. There are millions of South Africans who will not survive three more weeks of economic cardiac arrest.
On the other hand, I see many people worrying that ending the lockdown or even relaxing it is premature. Most South Africans have been admirably self-disciplined over the past two weeks, but as soon as we’re given even a sniff of a return to some sort of normality — as soon as that surface tension of self-denial is broken — I can imagine many people dropping straight back into life as it was, perhaps with fractionally more handwashing.
At the time of writing, 63,776 tests had been completed. That’s 0.1% of the population. If that's hard to imagine, picture Ellis Park or the Cape Town Stadium packed to capacity. The number of people who have been tested, as a proportion of people in one of those fully packed stadiums, is about 60. That's the queue to the toilets. It's nothing. Anything extrapolated from a sample that small isn't science but speculative fiction.
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