Thomas Johnson - Medical Blog

Covid reached a million cases in South Africa over the Christmas weekend and the band plays on. No one seems to have noticed the oddity revealed in President Cyril Ramaphosa's "emotional" address on Monday: members of the military-style command council recalled from their "festive breaks" while a "war" is raging. Like Western Cape health MEC Nomaindia Mbombo who went on holiday to Limpopo while the WC experiences a Covid surge worse than the first. And when these putative leaders return from their breaks they'll bring the virus with them, infecting colleagues and family, ironically, what they're concerned holidaying citizens are doing. It's no wonder the virus is rampant in SA. Like UK and US, its leaders are on holiday, playing golf or - something Ramaphosa shares with Johnson - weak, ineffectual and flip-flopping. And SA's people too are throwing caution to the winds as they always do - capacity shopping malls and beaches and ignoring...

Prof. Devi Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health, University of Edinburgh in The Guardian on December 24:  “The responsibility for this new [Covid-19] variant [in the UK which is similar to SA's] can partly be attributed to those who argued against restrictions, believing that allowing the virus to run rampant in young people while shielding the vulnerable would allow immunity to develop. Such conditions are ripe for variants to emerge. Unless we suppress the virus, it will probably mutate further. This could make our current vaccines ineffective, or lead to reinfections.” The UK is now called “Plague Island”, exacerbated by its Brexit woes. Because of the infectious variant, Boris Johnson, after as usual flip-flopping, “cancelled Christmas”. The British wanted to be isolated but not in the way they thought. Meanwhile, like the UK, the DA and DA-run Western Cape too are heading for their own right-wing isolationist bubble by arguing against restrictions (John Steenhhuisen, ri...