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Covid complacency threatens South Africa

The country’s low death rate is deceptive and hides government incompetence and corruption

The Times

It has been one of the pandemic’s few pleasant surprises: South Africa has had far fewer deaths than expected. In the spring everyone, including the government, anticipated that the country, with the rest of the continent, would be hit hard by Covid-19. With its high levels of poverty, overcrowded cities, relatively few hospitals and doctors, and many diseases already endemic, it looked like a candidate for death and illness on a grand scale.

Instead around 19,000 Covid deaths have been recorded in a population of 58 million. Ministers and officials have concluded that their strategies are working, and everybody from the World Health Organisation downward has been speculating about the reasons: could it be due to Vitamin D, the protective effect of TB vaccinations, South