How to save lives as we sustain livelihoods
Friday, June 5, 2020 0:01
By DENNIS KABAARA
A health worker demonstrates how to take temperatures from a patient during a drill on how to handle a patient who has signs of Covid 19 at Mt Kenya Hospital in Nyeri on March 17, 2020.
South Africa’s “reopening” from its own lockdown is based on a clever data-driven, five-level alert system that maps easing or tightening of allowable business activity and movement restrictions against the status of the pandemic in terms of the rate of virus spread, and the readiness of the health system.
On lives (the health dimension); controlling virus spread is important, as is the strengthening of health capacity and enhanced testing (where we lag South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia and Uganda in absolute terms, and South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda and Senegal relative to population size).
On livelihoods (the economic dimension); the strong view remains that the quantum and quality of support to the private sector and the public has been woefully inadequate and still needs to be ramped up.
Add to this mapping of private sector and workers (especially youth) to assess different sub-sectoral impacts between risks to the economy and jobs, and risks of new virus spread and reproduction.
