Faizel Patel – 10/11/2020
Wits professor Shabir Madhi says while the Eastern Cape is seeing a resurgence of the Coronavirus and the rest of the country is steady, people must adhere to the wearing of face masks, avoid mass gatherings and maintain social distancing.
Madhi was speaking to Radio Islam on Monday about a wide range of Coronavirus related news including the much anticipated address by President Cyril Ramaphosa and concerns that after eight months of Covid-19 and almost 5-million tests, the contact-tracing challenge remains unsolved.
Madhi says South Africans in general are being irresponsible by not abiding to the Coronavirus regulations and for thinking that the country has overcome the pandemic.
“I hate to say, when I’ve been going to the mosque, unfortunately that simply is not taking place and we believe that COVID-19 is over and we’ve stepped anything that far from reality. We are going to experience a resurgence and unfortunately the behaviour of South Africans in general is leading to a resurgence much sooner than one would’ve expected.”
Speaking about contact tracing, Professor Madhi says there are a number of challenges.
He says contact tracing involving thousands of cases that need to be followed up if the average number of COVID-19 cases is about one thousand a day.
“In South Africa at the moment where we are diagnosing about a thousand new cases per day, in fact one thousand five hundred new cases per day, that would translate into close on to two hundred thousand close contacts needing to be followed up and going into quarantine each day. So contact tracing has got a role at a certain stage of the epidemic. But when you start dealing with cases into the hundreds and definitely into the thousands, the ability to pull it off is almost impossible.”
Professor Madhi says Pfizer’s data showing that the COVID-19 vaccine that it is developing is more than 90% effective is a phenomenal achievement.
The professor who is leading SA’s vaccine trial says Pfizer’s COVID-19 trials also bodes well for other vaccines.
“Many of the other vaccines that are currently in clinician development are using the same sort of target of the virus to develop into a vaccine. The results are really phenomenal as well. There’s very few vaccines that provide 90% protection including mild, moderate and severe disease. To protect against mild illness is in fact more difficult than to protect against severe disease from any vaccine, so that itself is another major achievement.”
Ramaphosa in his weekly newsletter “From the desk of the President” on Monday said while South Africa is now in a transition period and on its way to recovery, we must observe the COVID-19 public health guidelines that remain in place to prevent a second wave of Coronavirus infections in the country.
Listen to the interview with Professor Shabir Madhi
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