EDITORIAL | As things return to normal, let’s not unmask a backslide

Cast your minds back, if you will, to two years ago. There was a flu-like illness moving through China and it was starting to spread — the novel (or new) coronavirus.

Scientists warned it had the potential to cause chaos, leaving severe illness and death in its wake. But little did we know just how much chaos, illness and death we would see.

On Saturday South Africans will wake up to exactly two years of Covid-19. According to the latest available National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) stats at the time of publication, there have been 3,677,686 officially confirmed infections across SA. There have been 99,458 official deaths.

But experts say the tally on both fronts is a lot higher.

SA Medical Research Council (SAMRC) shows that since May 2020, there have been 297,847 excess deaths recorded in the country.

It is also likely millions of people were infected with Covid-19 but never tested, meaning they aren’t covered in the official stats.

The health department said at the end of January that “the proportion of people with immunity to Covid-19 has risen substantially, exceeding 60% to 80% in several sero-surveys”.

The two-year anniversary of the first confirmed case is a useful reminder of just how hard the past 24 months have been and of how much we’ve lost.

When SA went into its first lockdown on March 27 2020, many thought it would be a few weeks. The virus would blow over and we’d be back to normal. This hasn’t happened. Saturday’s two-year anniversary of the first confirmed case will be SA’s 709th day under some level of lockdown.

In these past two years South Africans have witnessed economic devastation. An already weakened economy took repeated blows from the effects of the virus and government’s sometimes poor decision-making.

But now things are starting to return to a “new normal”, a much derided phrase, but one that seems appropriate. President Cyril Ramaphosa announced during his state of the nation address (Sona) that the state of disaster would be lifted “soon”, and presidency and health department officials have said the only delay is working out how to keep some restrictions and mandates in place under existing legislation.

Companies are starting to encourage employees to get back to the office, sports clubs and schools are opening up for events, professional sports (except for the PSL, bizarrely) are welcoming back fans and restaurants are filling up. We’re not quite at pre-pandemic levels, but some semblance of what 2019 and the first two months of 2020 looked like are returning.

And while this is welcome, the two-year anniversary of the first confirmed case is a useful reminder of just how hard the past 24 months have been and of how much we’ve lost — in every sense of the word.

The message now, as we stop and take stock, is to be mindful of the hardships we’ve suffered as we move forward. Hundreds of thousands have lost loved ones, while jobs have been shed at an alarming rate. Too many to count have been plunged into poverty and, in many cases, even deeper into poverty than they already were.

Even as things move towards the way they were, we all have a responsibility to ensure we do the right things to prevent a resurgence. We’ve lost too much to do anything else.