Holding elections will put lives at risk, says health director-general

SA may reach Covid-19 population immunity only in February 2022, and forging ahead with elections later in 2021 will endanger lives, health department director-general Sandile Buthelezi said on Thursday.

The department has become the latest entity to pour cold water on the feasibility of holding free and fair elections under Covid-19 conditions at the Moseneke inquiry. 

Buthelezi said the virus, which has so far claimed the lives of more than 60,000 South Africans, was vicious and the Delta variant, which has spread to most of SA’s provinces, made matters worse because it has since been discovered that reinfection was possible.

He said if the vote took place, many would be at risk.

“Holding of elections could put members of the public at risk of contracting Covid-19 during various activities, such as physical voter registration, the voting process itself, where large numbers gather at polling stations and queue to complete their ballot, [and] large political gatherings, especially in venues that are difficult to manage or limit,” he said.

Buthelezi said the rollout of the vaccine programme may not have reached sufficient people to have achieve population protections. 

He said by the proposed election date of October 27, at current rates, the country would have vaccinated only 16-million, while the figure needed to achieve immunity was estimated at 40-million.

The director-general said he was confident the department would achieve this target if it diversified SA’s vaccination supply and there were no further disruptions.

Asked on how the department planned to achieve that, Buthelezi said they sought to vaccinate 200,000 people a day, which would be a million a week. They were also looking at roping in senior medical students to assist with the rollout on weekends, which would assist the country in achieving the February target for population immunity.

Moseneke, who was appointed as an arbitrator in the decision on whether to hold elections, put it to Buthelezi that, based on his submission, the country was likely to still be under level 4 of the lockdown regulations.

Buthelezi said that could be the case, “probably not as severe as we are right now, but there will be some level of restrictions by that time definitely, if we are looking or learning from what has been happening in the past two waves”.

Some stakeholders have told the inquiry that election day was a culmination of the work that began months before the day. Buthelezi echoed similar sentiments. 

Asked to give the best prognosis on what the situation would be mid-October, Buthelezi said SA was likely to be getting out of the third wave.   

“It’s something that is very difficult to predict because we’re dealing with different variants.... But we do not think we will be starting a fourth wave at that particular time.” 

This view, however, contradicted a prognosis provided by health experts who told the inquiry SA could be well into the fourth wave on election day.