Scientists, officials lock horns over state of disaster

With the end of the fourth wave of Covid-19 on the horizon in SA and the end of the current national state of disaster due in a few days, scientists and politicians have made calls for President Cyril Ramaphosa to allow it to lapse as it is no longer considered necessary and undermines democracy.

The national state of disaster is declared under the Disaster Management Act and allows co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to make regulations such as imposing lockdowns, curfews and other restrictions without parliamentary oversight. This was ostensibly to slow down the rate of infection and lessen the burden on the health system.

It has been renewed monthly since March 2020 at the start of the global pandemic. The current period is due to end on Saturday. It can be reimposed whenever deemed necessary by the cabinet.

Shabir Madhi, dean of the University of Witwatersrand’s faculty of health sciences and professor of vaccinology, said there is no reason to renew the state of disaster.

“There is absolutely no excuse in my mind for having an ongoing state of disaster and more so in a country where we now have pretty much lifted all restrictions,” he told Business Day on Tuesday.

“I think we are at a very different stage of the pandemic and there needs to be greater oversight including of the decisions made by the NCCC [national coronavirus command council] because this is a time when we need to start reconstructing the economy, the education sector and every other aspect of our lives,” Madhi said.

He noted that the number of people who died during the Omicron wave would probably be equal to, if not less than, the 10,000 to 11,000 people who died from seasonal influenza before Covid-19 arrived, and substantially lower than the 58,000 people who died annually due to tuberculosis.

“There has been a very different experience with this [Omicron] wave despite the number of people being infected. It tells us that something has changed dramatically; that there are some changes in the characteristics of the virus but more important is the extensive amount of immunity that has evolved at a population level which doesn’t necessarily protect against infection but certainly has done a really good job in protecting against severe disease.”

Madhi said the experience of the fourth wave has been that the death rate is probably less than one-tenth of that experienced in the third wave, which resulted in about 50% of all deaths due to Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.

The fourth wave has caused fewer than 5% of all of the Covid19 deaths. All provinces, with Gauteng in the lead by about two weeks, were at the tail end of the fourth wave.

He said the only reason to have a national state of disaster is to spread out the period during

which infections occur to prevent a surge in hospital cases, and in the case of the first wave to give health facilities time to prepare themselves. It will not prevent the spread of infection.

Nicholas Crisp, deputy director-general in the department of health, said ending the state of disaster immediately would create “chaos” and remove the government’s ability to impose restrictions such as mandating masks in indoor areas or closing schools to deal with spiking infections.

No other provisions outside the disaster regulations would allow that, he said. “Can we just drop it overnight? No, we would have chaos,” Crisp said.

Officials need “some sort of legal tool to allow us to do what we need to do”, and something like the state of disaster is needed to deal with existing regulations and allow a quick response, he said.

Helen Suzman Foundation legal counsellor Anton van Dalsen said it is undemocratic that the minister could declare national states of disasters indefinitely without an end date.

“The minister is effectively given unfettered discretion to prolong it,” he said. While the legal right exists to challenge any unreasonable invasion of individual rights, in practice it is difficult to enforce because of the length of time it takes to get to court, by which time the rules might have changed.

DA leader John Steenhuisen said the state of disaster is no longer necessary to manage the virus and is doing more harm than good by undermining SA’s social, economic and democratic recovery.

“The pandemic has become endemic in SA. We need to get back to living normal lives and accept that the virus will continue to circulate, as other viruses do,” he said.

But this view is still contrary to advice from the World Health Organization (WHO), with senior emergencies officer at WHO Europe Catherine Smallwood quoted by international media as saying: “We still have a huge amount of uncertainty and a virus that is evolving quite quickly, imposing new challenges”. A move to an endemic status would also depend on the availability of vaccines globally in an equitable manner, Smallwood said.

An infectious disease is considered endemic when it is circulating at a level that is considered to be acceptable and can be managed without special restrictions.

“What we’re seeing at the moment coming into 2022 is nowhere near that,” Smallwood was quoted as saying.