UK Edition
The rapid spread of the new UK Covid variant has stunned both the UK and Irish authorities, but we are now seeing equally worrying trends across southern Africa.
In South Africa, case numbers have rocketed from 1,000 a day in October to 20,000 a day now, amid the discovery of a new variant there. These numbers come during their summer holiday, when seasonal factors should keep infections low.
Efforts to contain this within southern Africa appear to have failed. More than one-third of all Covid-19 cases found in Zimbabwe over the past 12 months have been detected in just the first ten days of 2021.
A quarter of Zambia’s and more than 40 per cent of Lesothos’s cases have also been found since the start of the year; Mozambique’s daily peak of around 300 cases in 2020 was smashed on Saturday when nearly 900 new cases were recorded.
Is this just a Christmas hangover of cases spreading due to more mixing over the holidays? We can’t know for sure. But a small sample of tests in Zambia in late December found that most were the new South African variant.
A few months ago, the Covid-19 mutation that most people worried about was one that would make the disease more deadly. The second wave of the Spanish flu proved far more lethal than the first.
However, a virus that becomes more transmissible is worse, as Adam Kucharski, author of the Rules of Contagion, points out. He estimates that a virus that becomes 50 per cent more deadly will kill roughly 50 per cent more people over a 30 day period, but one that is 50 per cent more transmissible will kill over five times more people.
The new UK and SA variants are estimated to be 50 to 70 per cent more transmissible.
There are two policy responses to this in the UK and Ireland – hard lockdown and a rapid vaccine rollout. Sadly neither are easy options in southern Africa.
Lockdowns generally don’t work in low-income countries, as nations from Peru to India to South Africa discovered last year. For most people in low income countries, the choice is not between working from home or from the office – it’s whether you can work and feed your family, or not.
Even if lockdowns don’t eradicate the virus, they can still be helpful in slowing the virus spread until vaccines are rolled out. On January 2, Zimbabwe banned inter-city travel and ordered non-essential businesses to close. On Monday, the South African government shut its land borders.
But, here again southern Africa faces a big problem. There are no vaccines to roll out. Israel, the UAE and Bahrain have already won the vaccine race against the new variants.
People in their 20s are now getting the vaccine in Israel, but the WHO says vaccines for many in Africa will not come for weeks or months yet.
The choice facing southern African governments is terrible. Do they send the economy back into deep recession, trying to enact a lockdown that they know won’t work, and build up debt levels that will be hard to afford? Or do they let the virus spread and accept a big rise in deaths?
If there is one small mercy, it is that the proportion of the elderly in southern Africa is so much smaller than in Europe. While roughly 14 per cent of the UK population is over 70, the number of elderly for South Africa is three per cent, Zimbabwe two per cent and in Zambia just one per cent. It would take just a quarter of a million vaccinations to protect all over 70s in Zambia – Israel vaccinates this many people every 36 hours.
If vaccinations can be accelerated, children could be sent back to school, adults can get back to work and countries that need economic growth the most can get back on the right trajectory.
The best belated Christmas present the West could give would be vaccines to these countries being hit so hard.
Charlie Robertson is global chief economist at Renaissance Capital, an emerging and frontier investment bank
Analysis: Southern Africa's Covid cases rocket – but there are no vaccines to roll out
In South Africa, cases have climbed from 1,000 a day in October to 20,000 a day now