The Logic of South Africa's Lockdown
On Thurs eve, South Africa will have a form of martial law imposed. Almost all 50+ million citizens will be confined to their own properties for 21 days by the police and army - except to buy food. Imprisonment is threatened if people break this curfew.
What the science behind it? Will it solve our problem? I have been thinking about this a lot. Public Health was the subject of my Master's Degree and I trained as a medical doctor.
From what we know about the virus and what's happened in Wuhan, Northern Italy & South Korea, South Africa's President has acted decisively, and earlier than a lot of other nations.
Officially, (right now - 25th March) we are 554 cases with 2 critical and 0 deaths yet. However, with a 14-day window period to develop symptoms it's likely there are a lot more who are infected.
You or I could be one of them.
So, confining the whole country to quarters for 3 weeks is a clever move because if any of us have it, it will take up to 14 days to develop symptoms. We then have another 7 days to recover and develop immunity. During that entire time, no-one should pass the virus on beyond their household members.
Epidemics rely on transmission from host to host to survive. The virus only has a limited lifespan (I say 'life' loosely as a virus isn't living) until the host develops immunity. If the virus doesn't jump to another host before the host develops immunity, it will 'die' out.
This is how we beat this virus. We stop it jumping to other hosts (typically two to thee people in a normal environment) and cause the epidemic to die out. Everyone must be on board. Hopefully, if we do it correctly, we'll halt the epidemic before it reaches those who need ICU to beat it. That would truly be a triumph.
Come on South Africa, let's do this! All epidemics die out eventually, but let's kill this beast early through drastic action! Though costly to our finances, the economy, small businesses. It's far less costly than if we become an 'Italy'. It's the wise thing to do and also the logical one!