Ghost of Christmas past banished by hope of Christmas present

This time last year, Christmas joy was tempered by heartbreaking scenes of hospitals packed beyond capacity, a shortage of oxygen and morgues overflowing with the dead.

Queues for PCR tests snaked around testing sites and there was no sign of a vaccine rollout on the horizon.

Blue collar workers were putting their health in jeopardy to earn a living while health workers were doing the same to save the lives of others.

Many others were battling the mental health fallout of isolation after nearly a year of working from home, and students of all age groups had adapted to a new — and uneven — playing field of “hybrid” learning models.

From variants to vaccines, infection numbers to lifestyle changes, South Africans this Christmas are in a vastly different position. But in some ways, it’s a case of “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

This time last year, a “new and highly transmissible variant” had just been announced and was said to be responsible for the second wave ravaging the country.

It was eventually named Beta but only after being dubbed “the South African variant” in news reports around the world.

The term raised the ire of top local professors like Salim Abdool Karim and Tulio de Oliveira who, with his team, had discovered it.

De Oliveira said: “It could easily have emerged elsewhere. It’s only thanks to our excellent genomic surveillance here that we know about it.”

Eleven months later, it felt like history was repeating itself, except this time around it isn’t just a name.

The discovery by local scientists — again, De Oliveira and his team — of what’s now called Omicron led to a flurry of cancelled flights and borders closing to anyone from Southern Africa.

The World Health Organisation eventually weighed in, saying SA was being punished for excellent science.

Omicron has been confirmed in nearly 100 countries, quickly replacing the Delta variant which ravaged SA in the third wave that fell squarely between last Christmas and this one.

This time last year, not a single jab had landed or been administered in SA and the government was criticised for its lack of swift action. It was only in the new year that planning began in earnest.

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Wits University professor of vaccinology Shabir Madhi said at the time: “Government only started planning in early January after a media backlash ... Even after this second-wave resurgence dies down, we will get another one, and vaccine deployment will be too late for high-risk groups then.”

In February, vaccines were made available to health workers under the Sisonke study, and in May the country’s biggest adult vaccination programme began.

Almost 28-million doses have been administered, but overall coverage remains low with only 39% of the adult population fully vaccinated.

Early fears of queue-jumping and supply constraints are lost in the mists of time, with vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vaxxer movement still posing a much greater challenge as the new year looms.

This time last year, then-health minister Zweli Mkhize — now sidelined by the Digital Vibes scandal — reported the worryingly high number of infections the day before.

As South Africans packed their bags for holidays or the long trek home to rural areas, the minister issued a warning: “We can never stress enough the need for citizens to take every precaution as we celebrate the festive season and look for reprieve from a tough year,” he said, “Covid-19 is unrelenting and we can’t afford to be complacent at this stage.”

Mkhize said SA's Christmas Eve infections were a new record at just above 14,000. That total has since been eclipsed more than 50 times, including on four occasions last week.

Despite the high number of infections this month, the low rate of hospitalisations and deaths is a key difference with a year ago. Between December 1 and 24 last year, 4,339 people officially died of Covid. A year later, the number is around 650. 

Health minister Joe Phaahla said that in a single week of the Omicron-fuelled fourth wave, only 1.7% of identified cases landed up in hospital. This compared to 19% in the third wave.

Recent excess deaths from Covid are at an eighth of their previous peak, according to the SA Medical Research Council.

“We are really seeing very small increases in the number of deaths,” said Michelle Groome, head of health surveillance for the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

She added that more than 90% of hospital deaths were among the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.