No more meetings, no education, no alcohol sales, no dinners in restaurants, and a curfew from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. South Africa, where winter has arrived, is locked again.
Back to January level
Due to the more contagious delta variant of the virus, there is a third wave of infection in the country. Last week, an average of 171 corona deaths per day and an average of more than 15,000 infections were added daily. This brings the country back to the level of early January.
The national women’s football team, which was to travel to the Netherlands for the Orange squad to the Olympic Games, was not spared either. Due to five corona cases, that game was canceled and the entire South African selection is in self-isolation.
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“We are in the grip of a devastating wave of contagion that by all indications will be worse than the one before it,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement on Sunday. a speech. “The peak of this third wave seems higher than the previous two.” He also expects the third wave to last longer.
Depends on other countries
A large-scale national vaccination program does not exist in South Africa. So far, 2.68 million corona shots have been taken, on a population of more than 60 million inhabitants. Only 0.8 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.
The country has become largely dependent on Covax, the global program set up by the World Health Organization, among others, to vaccinate people in poorer countries. But that program has also been facing major problems since the major outbreak in India, which had promised most deliveries, but ultimately kept them for its own people.
‘Massive campaign needed’
“The rollout is still going much slower than hoped due to a lack of money and promised donations from richer countries,” says Remco van de Pas of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp and a researcher at Clingendael. According to him, a massive vaccination campaign is needed to stop the virus in poorer countries. “But it remains a far from our bed show. Here in the West we no longer feel the pandemic. We are going into the summer without mouth caps.”
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The South African dependence on Covax has several causes. The country had a deal with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, but sold those vaccines on because a study alleged that they offered ‘minimal protection’ against milder variants of the virus, which were most common in South Africa at the time.
Concerns about side effects
Things also went wrong with Janssen vaccines. Due to concerns about side effects, the South African government stopped the rollout. But then switching to another vaccine, as in the Netherlands, was no longer possible.
Meanwhile, the African Union blames richer countries for deliberately keeping vaccine stocks and production for themselves. “We were convinced in December that the whole world was coming together to buy vaccines,” African Union special envoy Strive Masiyiwa told the British newspaper. The Guardian. “Not knowing we were locked in a small corner while the others ran off to secure supplies.”
More revival in Africa
It is feared that the virus will spread to more African countries. That fear seems justified, with revivals in neighboring Namibia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and Uganda.
“This pandemic could rapidly worsen in these countries and have even more impact,” says health expert Van de Pas. “The problem is not just too few vaccines. In many African hospitals there is a lack of oxygen, corona medicines and cooling systems to store vaccines.”
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According to Van de Pas, the solution lies in making lasting international agreements for dealing with the pandemic and investing further in local vaccine production in countries such as South Africa, Rwanda and Senegal. “What you see happening now is that a world that should actually act collectively against a global problem is failing. But it is a shared problem and a shared responsibility, just like the climate problem.”
Next pandemic?
Agreements that may come in handy in the future. Van der Pas: “We see enough risks that a next viral pandemic will break out after corona. Due to our international economies and intensive livestock farming, the chance that a new virus will jump from animals to humans is very real. And the corona virus can also continue to mutate.”
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