Lifting booze ban leads to 15% spike in unnatural deaths

Unnatural deaths have seen an increase since the country moved to level 2 lockdown as 15% above the predicted number of deaths by unnatural causes was recorded in the first week, with alcohol likely to be the cause.

According to the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), the number of unnatural deaths increased by 285 deaths during the week of 19-25 August from 827 to 1112 deaths.

Although the data had limited information which could not determine the exact cause for the increase, previous trends showed a large portion was due to violence and fatal road accidents, said SAMRC’s chief specialist scientist Professor Debbie Bradshaw.

“In addition, we know that alcohol plays a contributory role in such deaths. It is quite likely that the unbanning of alcohol has contributed but, we are not able to say this for sure from these data,” she said.

Epidemiologist and lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch, Professor Jo Barnes, however, said various reasons besides alcohol could have led to the increase, such as the opening of the economy, which led to more people on the roads and the psychological effects of the lockdown which could lead to violence.

Graphic: Costa Mokola

“People are returning to work, economies are opening up, and people are traveling and using roads. It could be expected that traffic accidents and industrial accidents will increase, as well as interpersonal violence.”

“If you lock people down inside their homes severely for weeks, and suddenly let them out, with or without alcohol, there will be a lot of movement… With a very hard hit that the economy has had and a lot of people having lost their jobs… a lot of people are psychologically affected so there is a lot of short temper and fights, which are not all directed by alcohol,” said Barnes.

Unnatural deaths, which usually make up a much higher proportion of all deaths in South Africa than in developed countries, significantly reduced once economic and social activities were restricted under lockdown level 5.

The number of unnatural deaths on average were predicted to be 1,000 per week, but the number almost halved to just over 500 per week during the level 5 lockdown period, and increased to about 620 unnatural deaths per week of level 4, explained Bradshaw.

“In level 3 it reached the predicted number and then dropped slightly to an average of about 960 per week. When alcohol was re-banned, the number dropped to about 810 per week and in the first week of level 2, the number has reached 1100,” she said.

Reliable and quicker reporting on unnatural deaths could be beneficial in order to assess and make sense of the causes, Barnes said.

“It would really be in the country’s interest for us to get more reliable and quicker reporting, because some of these deaths take a long time to be taken up in the system. We don’t only need error-free but also fast reporting to make sense of it.”

The SAMRC urged the government to find a way of fast-tracking the processing of information provided by doctors in the death notifications forms.

“We are concerned that we do not know what the underlying causes of the deaths are and will have to wait three years on the data for the causes of deaths to be processed,” said Bradshaw.

rorisangk@citizen.co.za

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