There’s a strange silence in all the talking and shouting and laughing; a small cluster of potent, unsayable words and phrases being avoided as life in SA tries so frantically to return to a pre-Covid normality: “uptick”; “resurgence”; “second wave”; and that other one, the one I’m too afraid to write, that starts with an L and ends with an N and rage and protests.
I understand the silence. This, right now, with friends and a glass of wine, feels good.
The news, too, still seems encouraging. The proportion of Covid tests producing a positive result in SA has held below 9% since September 30. The most recent and alarming outbreaks seem to have been the result of reckless but isolated “super-spreader” events involving the undeveloped frontal cortexes of children and the overdeveloped sense of entitlement of certain bar owners.
But there are some clouds starting to build on the horizon. The ANC is making fretful noises about the Western Cape’s infection figures, which, given what happened the last time it wagged its finger at Cape Town, probably means that it needs a smokescreen to hide whatever is about to start happening again in its provinces.
Then there’s the jubilant, fin de siècle hedonism that has set in, not so much pandemic fatigue as a desire to squeeze every pleasure out of life before it all gets shut away again: this weekend I was in Stellenbosch and watched hundreds of mask-less students crowd into airless spaces apparently for the sole purpose of expelling the contents of their lungs directly onto each other’s tongues.
In purely statistical terms, some new scourge has arrived and killed 40% more people than Covid-19. If the state and the Medical Research Council are both right then surely we need to know what this monster is?
Which is why I suspect that, at some point in the next month or two, we’re reluctantly going to start using those unsayable words, and trying to find the emotional and financial reserves to go another round with this goddamned virus.
When we do, however, I hope we’re also starting to have slightly different conversations, informed by the best health writers in the country and editors who understand the difference between potent, informative statistics and sensational but meaningless ones.
I should hasten to add that some have been doing superb work since the get-go, grinding through huge amounts of often contradictory or vague data as the maelstrom of political posturing and pseudoscience roars around them.
But the media, which ultimately sells novelty, doesn’t have the luxury of the state to repeat the same message over and over again. No matter how excellent a publication’s health writers might be, it simply can’t put up the same, slightly updated statistic on the front page every day, drilling into readers’ awareness in the way official press releases or Twitter feeds can.
So I don’t know how these messages get out. But if the second wave appears and gathers momentum, I hope that those excellent writers get more space and therefore more power to shift us away from garbage figures (such as the utterly meaningless daily tally of new infections) towards some essential ones, like the percentage of positive tests or the number of hospitalisations.
Certainly, two of the most essential numbers that need to be crunched – or at least reconciled and integrated – are the state’s official death toll and the number of “excess deaths” reported by the South African Medical Research Council.
At the time of writing, these figures remain starkly different: according to the state, 18,968 have died of Covid-19, while according to the SAMRC, 46,759 “excess” deaths have occurred since the beginning of May, that is, deaths over and above the “normal” number predicted by demographic data from past years.
Now, I am neither a statistician nor a health journalist, but the following does seem fairly clear.
If both the state’s and the SAMRC’s figures are more or less correct, then basic arithmetic insists that 27,000 South Africans who wouldn’t normally have died in an ordinary year have succumbed to causes other than the coronavirus. In purely statistical terms, some new scourge has arrived and killed 40% more people than Covid-19. If the state and SAMRC are both right then surely we need to know what this monster is?
If, on the other hand, the state’s figures are not accurate, and many of those 27,000 extra deaths were in fact caused by Covid-19, then which of the state’s claims still hold up? Does a much higher death toll imply that the lockdown was dramatically less effective than the government claimed, and that future lockdowns need to be re-evaluated? Or does the state simply go the other way and claim that we clearly had a bigger and more lethal outbreak than initially believed, which made the hard lockdown even more essential and which ultimately saved us from becoming Brazil?
We may yet be cursed with a second wave. But if we are, may we at least be blessed with good statistics.
