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Many children and parents will be extremely disappointed at the decision by President Mnangagwa to defer the re-opening of schools, except for the writing of public examinations, but considering how the fourth wave of Covid-19 has been developing over the festive season and his priority on keeping people alive he made the right decision.
A week earlier, as the statistics showed the infection rates continuing to plummet from mid-month as fast as they had risen, it was easy for education authorities to make a decision to keep to January 10 on the assumption, or perhaps just the hope, that the trend would continue and by the second week of this month the infection rates would be very low and containable.
But that hope was dashed last week. Infection rates basically plateaued with, in fact, a slight rise during the middle of the week. And the plateau was a high one, around 1 500 new infections a day. This is probably an undercount.
With so many factories closed for their annual shut-down the checks and relentless pressure by designated managers to watch for the first symptoms and rapidly isolate any potential infection are simply not there.
So we probably have a fair number of people with very minor symptoms not bothering to get a confirmation test because even if they are slightly ill they think they will be better when the factory re-opens.
Anyway a lot of people would want to think they have a minor sore throat not Covid-19, and only get more active when severe symptoms develop. Quite a lot of these people will be vaccinated and so can expect just minor symptoms. Regrettably that plateauing and a reasonably likely rise in infection rates arises from complacency, bad advice on social media, and a far too general feeling that strict precautions are bit of a bore when everyone wants to have some fun over the festive season.
We saw this last year when carelessness sparked off the serious second wave. If the strict public health requirements of the level two lockdown had been followed fully as people unwound over the festive season, and this would include family reunions, and a far higher percentage of the population had accepted their free vaccinations in time, we might have avoided the present plateau or worse.
Enforcement is never really effective since we cannot have a squad of police on every street corner or in every rural and suburban business centre. Shops, offices, factories and mines can enforce rules, and they do this, but for the rest of our normal life the responsibility is ours, which is why the authorities, from the President down, make such an issue of basically begging us to be sensible.
Some people, too many people, ignore the advice. They prefer to listen to gossip, amateurs on social media, and jump to their own conclusions.
The President gives us the lead of listening to people with a string of medical qualifications after their name and years of expertise in fighting infections, and they are certainly far more likely to be right than some over-hopeful amateur on social media or, even worse, some weird conspiracy theorist.
The present fourth wave is largely driven by the Omicron variant. There is now a general scientific consensus that the variant is extremely infectious, by the looks of it the most infectious of all variants, but produces a smaller percentage of patients with severe and life-threatening symptoms.
The problem with those dual sets of statistics is that they balance out when it comes to numbers. You still get the same number of deaths and very sick people. Far more people are infected, and even if a lower percentage die, you are still left with the same number of deaths. Part of the complacency also arises from the way this wave developed. There was a huge surge over two weeks, with hardly any deaths. But that could be expected since those who do get very sick from Covid-19 take up to three weeks to develop the most severe symptoms.
So by the time the infections rates started falling the death rates were very small. That led a lot of people to jump to the false and unscientific conclusion that Omicron was not “serious”. Vague and unscientific articles on social media fuelled the belief.
But death rates have been growing fast over the past fortnight as the more serious cases rise in number, with that delay between infection and death. By the end of last week, as President Mnangagwa noted, the average was already 20 or so deaths a day.
What is also apparent from the daily statistical reports from the Ministry of Health and Child Care is that there has been a tendency for some deaths to be confirmed late as arising from Covid-19.
This can be expected with the reporting procedure in place. The Ministry assumes nothing and has to wait while the figures rise from test-centre, hospital or morgue to the district medical headquarters, from there to the provincial centre and then to head office.
That should take a day, but obviously some clerical staff are not overactive in the festive season, even when doctors and nurses remain on duty. So figures are reported late.
The really worrying point of a plateau is that the graph can move in either direction. If people are taking advice in large numbers it might well start falling again.
But if complacency and carelessness are at high enough levels we will see rates rise. But even if we all start taking advice the plateau means there has been a long delay in beating back the fourth wave. President Mnangagwa has continually stressed that when he makes decisions, based on the best scientific and medical advice, his job is to keep us all alive and preferably in good health. If there is some inconvenience, then we can recover. If we are dead, we cannot.
He also is concerned that vaccination rates are so low in recent weeks. He made the decision early last year that vaccination must be free, and mobilised the Government to find the money and sort out the supply chains, and that was done successfully.
Zimbabwe is not only an African leader in this regard, but has put in place supply and distribution systems that compare well with developed nations. Millions responded, but millions have yet to do so.
Vaccination does not guarantee zero infection, but it lowers the risk and most importantly helps significantly in helping infected people recover quickly with far fewer moving into severe symptoms.
Getting ill and recovering does offer some protection, but again the medical consensus is that Omicron can re-infect very quickly and that vaccination, with boosters when called for, is far more reliable and longer lasting.
One reason why the risk for examination writers is acceptable is that almost all schoolchildren aged 16 and over, the age group actually writing the papers, are now vaccinated thanks to hard effort over the last three months in the Education and Health Ministries. So the risk is lower, and in any case with so few pupils at a school or examination centre it is easy to space them out using the vacant classrooms. We note that in this respect teenagers are often more sensible that many adults.
Although the President was very careful not to assign blame, it is obvious that many of us are part of the problem, not the solution. If we all followed the advice of medical experts fully we would probably have avoided the risk of a second spike. In the circumstances the President took the only rational decision.
Online Reporter