Covid-19: SA has no strategy for isolation and quarantine, says leading economist

Amid much devastation caused by the fast-spreading Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa – over a million cases recorded last month – the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) is seemingly stuck on a testing procedure taking several hours to produce results, over new technologies doing so in minutes.

With government having taken flak from leading economist Duma Gqubule for having demonstrated a lack of an effective Covid-19 strategy, NHLS pathologist professor Elizabeth Mayne has maintained that the polymerise chain reaction (PCR) – taking several hours to produce results – was “the gold standard for acute diagnosis”.

“We have the most current testing in SA and our turnaround times are in line with other international standards,” said Mayne.

As NHLS staff worked around the clock over the festive season, Mayne said testing backlogs were cleared. “We have validated about 100 tests and have a small number where the validation is ongoing.”

In lambasting government over its Covid-19 strategy, Gqubule – in his Facebook post – said rapid antibody tests and contact tracing were at the core of bringing the virus under control “without a vaccine or lockdown”.

“The government has not started purchasing rapid test kits. It also has no test-and-trace strategy.

“It has no strategy for isolation and quarantine, as we have seen in countries such as Taiwan, Australia and Ethiopia.

“The key in successful countries in East Asia that have brought the virus under control without a lockdown, has to do with what happens after people get infected – how to take out the circulating pool of infected people.”

South Africa, said Gqubule, followed “the failed strategy in the West, where countries have no option but to lock down”.

Professor Shabir Madhi, executive director of the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics research unit at Wits University, argued that rapid testing and contact tracing were “not even an option for SA, when you are diagnosing more than a few 100 cases – let alone 16,000 cases, per day”

Said Madhi: “To be effective, you need to trace close to 75% of the contacts, who need to go into quarantine for 14 days.”

brians@citizen.co.za

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