NEVA MAKGETLA: Government hurtling towards the farce of ignoring history again
In the early 2000s, SA’s graveyards had rows of new graves. From 2005 to 2008, 600,000 people died a year, almost twice as many as a decade earlier. Then the number began to fall, dropping below 450,000 by 2019. The reason? SA finally followed the science on HIV and rolled out antiretrovirals on a mass scale.
The HIV pandemic should have taught policymakers that pandemics don’t go away if you ignore them. They just get worse. Yet now, as a third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic threatens, the government is again walking away from scientific advice, avoiding the restrictions on social gatherings and alcohol sales needed to curb the pandemic...
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