COVID-19 - AND SOCIAL DISTANCING

SOCIAL DISTANCING

24 June 2020


Re: space between people in public places

My partner and I are in our 90s and we live in Preston. On Tuesday afternoon, 23 June 2020, we had to go to a doctors' clinic in High Street, Northcote and we went by taxi.
We were at the clinic for about an hour and when we were finished there we knew we would have to walk down to Northcote Plaza where there is a taxi rank, because there was no hope of hailing one in High Street at 4.15 in the afternoon.

If the government and the police think they will control the spread of the virus, all they need to do is look at the people walking around the streets of Northcote to see that hardly anyone was taking any notice of the directive to keep the spaces between people as recommended by the health experts.

We are in the most vulnerable age group and only go out when we have to visit doctors or hospitals, other than short walks around where we live for some exercise, but if anyone walking the streets of Northcote has the virus and either of us catch it, we will be goners for sure!

Mannie De Saxe (while I am still around!)

 

 

Letter in The Age today 30 June 2020:

No wonder the numbers are climbing

I agree with Mannie De Saxe (Letters, 25/6) that social distancing in Northcote is rarely being observed.
We have been abused for asking people on the streets to observe the rules, while others flip the bird or even yell "What are you going to do about it?" No wonder numbers of cases of coronavirus are climbing.

The only way I can see that attitudes will change is a more visible police presence on foot along High Street and surrounding streets.

Jennifer Frost, Thornbury

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

The Sydney Morning Herald

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

In times of uncertainty, you deserve understanding.

By Christos Tsiolkas

April 3, 2020 

He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. – Talleyrand

We are on day six of our self-isolation. Has it been less than a week since we caught the flight from London to Dubai, then Dubai to Melbourne? The COVID-19 virus has done many things, the most daunting and terrible being the lives that it has taken, but one of its aftershocks that has surprised me most is the alteration it has caused to our sense of time.

Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''Credit:Eddie Jim

Three weeks ago, we landed in Britain and though we joked and bantered about touching elbows rather than kissing, we did hug and embrace friends, we went out to dinners and we got drunk and sat shivering around outside heaters, shoulder to shoulder, in the freezing English spring night. Day by day, however, the anxiety and fears grew.

Throughout the first week, and then into the second, I receive constant emails from home announcing that first this festival and then another would be cancelled. On a train to Glasgow, preparing my reading for an event, my phone vibrates and a text informs me that the AyeWrite Festival has also been cancelled. By the third day in Scotland, reading the escalating warnings on the internet, my partner, Wayne, and I make the decision to return home.

We are fortunate. We booked our journey through a travel agent and within minutes of emailing him, he has got us on a flight departing London in two days. We know that there are many people not so lucky. The websites of all the airlines are crashing. The phones are not being answered. All we want is to return home. That very notion, home, one that I have questioned and resisted and challenged for so many years; that notion, too, has been altered by the virus. I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.

There is a strange and befuddling moment in Dubai airport. All the world seems to be there. We are Australians and New Zealanders, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, North American and Latin American, many of us scrolling on phones and laptops and iPads, seeking information on which borders have been closed, whether we can indeed go home. Some of us are sitting still and staring out into space, shifting in those uncomfortable vinyl chairs, trying to not touch and not to breathe on one another.

I am two seats away from a young woman, poised and elegantly dressed, her hair hidden under a rainbow-coloured turban. She is speaking on her phone in rapid French. My own French is weak but I gather she has managed to get on a flight to Lagos and from Lagos she will do her best to head home. Wherever home may be. “Paris was strange,” she says into her phone. “Everything was closed, everything was shut. I’ve never seen it like that.”

And it’s at that precise moment, overhearing her conversation, looking around me at the people staring at their screens, that it strikes me how bizarre and ridiculous it is that we all have only so recently been zig-zagging around the world, taking this freedom and this movement and this privilege for granted. It isn’t a moral aversion that I am experiencing. It isn’t righteousness; it is more a recognition of absurdity. I turn to Wayne when he comes back from the long wait for the toilets.

“All of this, it’s unnecessary.”

“No, we need to get home, this is serious.”

“No, not that. All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.”

''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''Credit:Getty Images

On returning home, I find a series of emails from Australian literary festivals and arts organisations bemoaning the deleterious effect of COVID-19 on the arts sector. I understand and share these fears. I’m one of the lucky ones, able to support myself from writing. But for most of my friends, their creative work is subsidised by work in hospitality, in retail, in the public sector and in non-government welfare organisations. The abrupt and shocking collapse of the economy has us all reeling. And has us all frightened. Theatres are no longer putting on plays and cinemas are shut; book launches and writing classes are cancelled.

Again, time has refracted back on itself and the arguments and politics and conversations we were all so engaged with, so furious and so passionate about only a few weeks ago, seem ephemeral and unimportant. Unemployment is now the most pressing issue affecting us all.

It isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will be our lifetime.

Of course, there is the desire to avoid the getting and the passing on of the virus. But those images of thousands of desperate souls lining up outside Centrelink are what has brought the severity of what we are all undergoing into deepest focus. The people in the queues are clearly ourselves – how we dress, how we use our mobiles, that negotiation of both digital and physical space – yet they also are evocative of a past that we never really imagined we would see again: the echoes of the Great Depression.

Writers and filmmakers and artists have always imagined apocalyptic scenarios, and climate change and rising inequality has made that a central concern of recent speculative art and fiction. But whether it is the savage and nihilistic violence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or the scenes of zombie rampage and annihilating natural disasters that have proliferated in popular cinema, what we hadn’t conceived was the moment of in-between. I think this is why the dole queues are particularly frightening. They remind us that it isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday – blithely assuming that the future would be ever-progressive and ever-prosperous – to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will take years. The in-between will be our lifetime.
So I worry for my friends who are writers and artists and playwrights and filmmakers. But I am equally worried for my friends who are nurses and couriers and administrators and teachers. All those differences we were extolling and idolising only a few weeks ago, they don’t matter much any more. In this moment, community trumps difference.

In between the pinging emails announcing the cancellation of one more writers’ festival and one more play, there have also been links to performances and artwork that people are creating online. There is indeed something exhilarating and defiant in the determination of the artist to keep making work. It might be my age or merely my disposition but I also sense something melancholy in the production of such work. A chamber orchestra plays in an vacant auditorium, a drag artist mimes in front of a DJ in an empty room. What is missing, and what is wretched, is that without the physical bodies of an audience, the work seems mere rehearsal. It is not unlike the few minutes of an AFL match I watched played without a crowd. The emptiness was deafening. I switched off the game. Guiltily, I switched off the music.

In some ways, I have been surprised by how much I have enjoyed this period of enforced isolation. In saying that, I know that I am fortunate. That I have a partner, a lovely home and shelves stacked with books and with LPs and with DVDs. We have friends and family and neighbours who make sure there is food on our doorstep and wine in our fridge.

I’m not a complete Luddite: YouTube and streaming have also kept me company. Yet it is the pleasures of the analogue world that have been the most satisfying and the most sustaining. I am halfway through a wonderful book, Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club, a tender requiem for the generation of eastern European dissidents who fled totalitarianism and wound up lost and exiled in Paris. It has been sitting by my bed for nearly two years now.

This morning, I was dancing to Hiperasia, a cheerfully inventive album by the Spanish electronica artist, El Guincho. As with the Guenassia novel, I’ve had it for some time. Only now do I give it a proper listen. Refracted through the changes brought about by the virus, the recent past seems an aeon ago. All the same, it has made me thankful for the present moment. Real time. The time of minutes and hours. The time of patience and reflection.

I miss people. Wayne and I discuss the progression of the virus, the responses globally and locally, the uncertain future that is coming. We both miss other voices, other perspectives, the opportunity to have one’s argument contested and opposed. Of course, this is possible online but Skype crackles and falters, the thin sounds on the other end don’t have the resonance of the human voice. Digital communication also exacerbates the limitations and prejudices of only speaking to those who think the same way you do.

There will come a time when we can return to the world, when social distancing will be the past. But there will be a ruined economy and there will be fractured communities. It is inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the writing and the art that is to come. Every day, I wander the hall, the rooms of our house, I walk into the garden and tell myself I should write. But all my ideas seem paltry and inadequate. It is a cliche, and also a truth, that writing is a solitary labour. It is only now, physically separated from friends and colleagues, that I realise how much sustenance and inspiration I receive from their insights, their conversation and their argument. A room of one’s own is a necessity. It is not enough. These are the conversations that I want to have.

So many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the urgency and virulence of this virus.

Yet there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting?

I worry about the overreach of state power in the responses to the virus. They are necessary, they are medically and scientifically sanctioned, but the powers of surveillance and control now being deployed are deeply illiberal. And once enacted such powers may be difficult to reverse. I am shocked at how little weight the notion of liberty seems to have among my peers. A formative political awakening for me was the politics of AIDS. Some of the finest writing and the best art of the 1980s came out of provocation and resistance at the demonisation, and the attempts of state control, over people’s bodies. That suspicion of the state – of its courts and judiciary, of its police and its military, of its bureaucracy and of its power – seems to be a matter of little concern to a present generation of writers and artists.

An equal shock has been the relative silence over the actions of the Communist Party of China. Other governments have made mistakes or have had to backtrack on initial responses but it has been the CPC that has been the most appalling actor in this short history of COVID-19; in its initial recklessness in turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed for its incubation, and in the terrifying repression it has visited on its own citizens.

I worry that we writers and artists have been woefully undergraduate in our rage over the past decade, tilting at the same bloody windmills. And maybe our understanding of history has been equally pitiful. The greatest gift reading history has done, is make me suspicious of certainty. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m really hankering to have. After the past few months, after these transformations, can a writer still adhere to certainty?

When we emerge out of our isolation, the world will be smaller and our horizons will be local. The priority will be solidarity and communion with the unemployed; everything else is not unimportant, but everything else will be secondary.

I also hope we emerge hungry for argument and conversation and debate. I hope our writing and our art asks more questions and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN ORGANISATION SASOL - OIL FROM COAL GERMAN TECHNOLOGY - SHOULD BE SOCIALISED!

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 19, Number 7, 23 March 2020

Voice of the South African Working Class

In this Issue:

Sasol should be socialised!

Introduction

The Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) and Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) lost in total more than R200 billion in this month’s crash of Sasol, reported the Business Report on 15 March 2020. The GEPF is managed, as an investment fund, by the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), while the IDC is a state development finance institution (DFI). The combined loss of workers and public funds occurred through 13.5% and 8.5% stakes held in Sasol by the GEPF and the IDC respectively. The landslide loss did not occur at Eskom or any SOE – it occurred, on the contrary, in a privatised company.

The silence of the private profit sector, its business associations and political and ideological agents, such as the DA, “expert” or “analyst” “notice me” and hangers-on, is deafening. The sycophantic supporters of privatisation are instead calling for more privatisation, divestment of the state in SOEs, and other neoliberal measures. The working class has to unite in defence of public property rights and for the SOEs to be turned around to thrive. Below the excerpt of the editorial from the forthcoming African Communist (Issue 202, 1^st & 2^nd Quarter 2020) deals with the failure of the privatised company, the crash of Sasol, and the way forward, socialisation! 

• Umsebenzi Online

Sasol should be socialised!   

African Communist editorial | Red Alert |

In just one single day in mid-March this year, Sasol lost 45,6% of its share price, with R76-billion of shareholder equity being wiped out in one week. In an attempt to reassure its shareholders, creditors and the markets more generally, Sasol put out a statement valuing its underly­ing assets at R23,3-billion. That’s no small sum, but it represents a huge collapse in value for this synthetic fuel company that was worth more than R400-billion just six years ago.

The immediate cause of the mid-March collapse was the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on global oil demand and the stand-off between two of the world’s major oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia. The oil price dropped to around $US35 a barrel. This is close to what the SACP (and others) have long assumed to be the cost to Sasol of producing oil from coal – a cost which, until now, Sasol has kept a closely guarded secret for reasons we will elaborate below.

But behind Sasol’s March 2020 troubles lies another story, and be­hind that story lies yet another. Before the advent of Covid-19 and the oil price collapse, Sasol was already in major trouble.

But let’s first travel back 14 years.

In February 2006 the SACP Central Committee put out a statement welcoming then Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel’s announcement that he was setting up a task team to investigate the possibility of im­posing a windfall tax on Sasol. The announcement was, in principle, an important step forward in the campaign that the SACP had been leading for some years for the socialisation of Sasol and its huge accu­mulation of profits.

Sasol was established in 1950 as a public entity. It was subsidised from the fiscus for many years to cover the difference between the glo­bal price of oil which hovered around $25 a barrel and Sasol’s cost to produce oil from coal (which we long assumed to be around $35). This arrangement was a key part of the strategic intervention of the apart­heid regime to ensure that South Africa’s industrial development was not entirely at the mercy of external oil producers (and later, of course, oil sanctions). This strategic intervention was successful. Today Sasol still supplies around 35% of South Africa’s petrol needs.

Following the global oil price shock of 1973, in which OPEC coun­tries collectively combined to limit production and drive up the global price, oil prices soared. Sasol became immensely profitable as it sold (as it still does) its oil on the South African market at the same price as imported oil. In 1979 Sasol was privatised and sold at a discount to established South African monopoly capital.

But through the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s the global price of oil, sometimes moving above $100 a barrel, was way above Sasol’s produc­tion cost. Over many decades, the South African economy and general public, not just car owners, but taxi and bus commuters, farmers us­ing tractors and food transporters have been subsiding mega-profits for Sasol’s private share-holders – paying at the pump for Sasol petrol as if it were imported all the way from the Middle East.

It is in this context that the SACP has called for the return of Sasol to public ownership and, as a first step, for a variable “windfall tax” to be imposed on Sasol for any time the global oil price tracks significantly above the $35 a barrel – the amount that we believed was the cost to Sasol for producing oil from coal. We also argued that this windfall tax could be the basis of a South African sovereign wealth fund.

So, in 2006 as the oil price hovered around $60, the central com­mittee welcomed Trevor Manuel’s announcement that he was finally establishing a task team to look at the windfall tax proposal. Sasol’s executives went ballistic. “The company is concerned that its ability to reinvest profits into its operations will be compromised if a windfall tax is imposed,” it proclaimed. Sasol CEO at the time, Pat Davies, made veiled threats about “re-thinking” its local investment plans.

To its credit, in 2007 Manuel’s task team, after detailed considera­tion, brushed aside this howling and strongly recommended a windfall tax on Sasol.

Instead, however, and inexplicably Treasury reached a “gentleman’s” agreement with Sasol – in exchange for not imposing the windfall tax, the company committed to investing some of its mega-profits in a new coal-to-oil plant in Limpopo (the so-called Mafutha project).

In 2012, with the global oil price around $120 a barrel, Sasol’s net profit for the year was R24-billion, but there was still no Mafutha! Then in 2013, Sasol announced a R200-billion investment in a gas to liquid plant, not in Limpopo, but in faraway Louisiana, USA.

Even the conservative Business Day journalist David Gleason was outraged: “Born courtesy of taxpayers…South Africa’s biggest compa­ny and world leader in various critical energy technologies is investing ever more deeply in the US than it is here. This may be the right thing for the company, but is it right for the country?”

Gleason was right, but he was also wrong – the decision to disinvest massively into the US has now proven to be a disaster for Sasol and its shareholders. The Louisiana project has run years over schedule and billions over budget. Sasol’s debt has ballooned and creditors are nerv­ous. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, before the oil price collapse, Sasol was in trouble. It joins a list of former pillars of the apartheid economy that disinvested out of South Africa and that have now run into trou­ble. Old Mutual burnt its fingers in London, Anglo American is a pale shadow of its past, SA Breweries got eaten up, Woolworths is limping from its Australian ventures.

And now to add further insult to our injury, Sasol has put out a state­ment reassuring its creditors and investors that even at $28 a barrel, the company can cut it. The blighters! All these years they have kept their cost of producing oil from coal a deep secret, disguising from the South African public the actual amount we have been subsidising mega profits over decades.

The wealth and world-class technical capacities of Sasol need to be socialised and harnessed for the overall development of our country. A windfall tax in 2007 would have been an important step forward in that direction. The task of socialisation has become a whole lot more complex, but no less critical.

• This is an excerpt of the editorial from the forthcoming African Communist, Issue Number 202, 1^st & 2^nd Quarter 2020

Mar 23

FROM DAILY MAVERICK 25 MARCH 2020

ANALYSIS: FACTS V. QUACKS

Comparing the government responses to #Covid19 under Ramaphosa and #HIV under Mbeki

By Mia Malan for the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism• 25 March 2020

Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa. Photo composite supplied by Bhekisisa

Reporting on Covid-19 and HIV in South Africa is like night and day, says a writer who has reported on both epidemics.

It’s the day after the plane containing our repatriates from Wuhan has landed, when Cyril Ramaphosa declares a National State of Disaster in the country, in front of a blaring television in my lounge, when it hits me: Nowhere am I able to see a single activist venting vociferously against the government.

No Zackie Achmats, Fatima Hassans, Vuyiseka Dubulas, Edwin Camerons or Mark Heywoods standing firmly at the ready to contradict the President. No demonstrators spread-eagled across burning tar, playing dead alongside placards pleading for medicine and for the state to use evidence-based strategies to combat an epidemic.

No health minister screeching “Traitors!” at scientists and journalists who disagree with her denial of science and her refusal to provide people with life-saving treatment.

No pontifications about potatoes, beetroot, lemon and garlic as excellent means to protect people from a potentially fatal virus.

Instead we have a president taking responsibility, surrounded by his sober Cabinet, announcing: “It is up to us to determine how long [this epidemic] will last, how damaging it will be and how long it will take our economy and our country to recover.”

An Aids epidemic did not exist, the duo insisted

I was a young reporter when former President Thabo Mbeki and his Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, shocked the world when they denied the link between HIV and Aids.

The virus, they argued, was not the cause of Aids. An Aids epidemic did not, in fact, exist, the duo insisted; it was all down to poverty. They also posited a range of conspiracy theories, including that HIV was manufactured in a lab somewhere in the West.

It was a truly tumultuous point in the history of our then young democracy.
If you were a dedicated health journalist during the late 1990s or early 2000s, you were basically a full-time Aids reporter. You spent your workdays recording Mbeki’s and Tshabalala-Msimang’s quackish HIV statements, which you then took to credible scientists and activists to correct by way of contradictory comments.

That, of course, was, if you DID disagree with the government.

But there were some in the media who either agreed with the president and the health minister, or could not muster the courage to oppose them. It was all about politics, and power.

HIV had become a political football, and with political leaders suggesting that a condition, which was killing hundreds of thousands, was simultaneously a hoax and something that had been manufactured by a demonic pharmaceutical industry, the issue transcended the realm of health. That meant that political and business journalists, also often editors-in-chief, joined the debate – and they chose sides that were mostly determined by politics, not science.

There was confusion all round, with mixed messages the order of the day.
I know this to be so, because I worked for the state broadcaster at the time, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation was a fierce supporter of the Mbeki government. Like many of my colleagues, I had to fight to get my stories, which more often than not presented opinions and facts that contradicted the president, aired.
  
Against the background of South Africa’s hard-fought-for young democracy at the time, disagreement with the president – and in essence taking the side of Western science – about the cause of a condition that was destroying the country, was frequently viewed as anti-democratic and even racist.

So, journalists, scientists and activists who opposed HIV quackery were “anti-Mbeki people”, not just mere supporters of science.

We were the enemy.

‘Shut up and listen!’

At the first International Aids Conference that was held on South African soil, in 2000, in Durban, the animosity was on open display amid the grandeur of the five-star Hilton Hotel, when the health minister reprimanded two world-renowned HIV scientists whose research appeared regularly in prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Tshabalala-Msimang ordered Salim Abdool Karim, now the head of the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research, Caprisa, and Hoosen Coovadia, then from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, to a luxury room where she chastised them in front of Health MECs and other politicians.

Both were respected health activists who had fought for equal access to healthcare for all races during apartheid.

“You’re disloyal! Traitors!” Abdool Karim remembers her screaming at them. “What you are doing is equal to treason to our country!”

Their sin was that they had been publicly defending HIV as the cause of Aids and advocating for access to antiretroviral treatment (labelled “poisonous” by Tshabalala-Msimang) for HIV-positive  South Africans. 

But when the two scientists tried to defend themselves, Abdool Karim recalls, Thabalala-Msimang interrupted them and yelled: “Shut up and listen!”

HIV stories – and scientists themselves – were filled with conflict

Twenty years later, after a decade of State Capture, and on the brink of another epidemic – Covid-19 – Abdool Karim received a call from the current health minister, Zweli Mkhize.

Mkhize was seeking advice, asking the scientist: “How do you think we can slow the spread” of the new coronavirus, known as SARS-Cov-2.

Says Abdool Karim: “With the coronavirus, our experience with government is exactly the opposite [of what we endured during the Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang era]. The minister has been contacting us, he wants to involve us, he is seeking the opposite of what Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang wanted.”

Abool Karim serves on a special Covid-19 committee. It advises the president on what actions to take. “With HIV we were so slack with taking things up, we delayed mother-to-child-prevention of HIV and access to antiretroviral treatment. But with Covid-19 we’re proactive and we’re acting early,” he says.
The consequences – in the form of more than 300,000 unnecessary HIV-related deaths, according to a Harvard University study – of the time the government took to respond to science, are unfortunately permanent.

As a result of the government’s contrasting responses, reporting on HIV and Covid-19 in South Africa as a journalist is like night and day. With one of the epidemics, activists and scientists were mostly our only sources of information, and the government the ones who blocked access to data. In the case of HIV, study after study has shown how conflict – one of the strongest news values – was a central theme in stories on the subject because of activists and government being played off against each other; but it often resulted in stories being repetitive, rather than meaningful.

With Covid-19, those same HIV activists who fought the government are now supporting and praising Cyril Ramaphosa’s early, evidence-based interventions. And the health ministry, which previously cut journalists off, has set up a media WhatsApp group through which the latest figures, as they become available, are posted directly to journalists’ phones. The system isn’t perfect – press releases have been retracted a few times because they contained the wrong figures – but the point is: there is a system that allows for a free flow of information. And when mistakes are made, the government has acknowledged them.

There’s even a data-free website and a public WhatsApp service that has so far been used by well over 2 million people, according to the health department. 

Is the ANC using its great power for good with Covid-19?

And, it seems, the ANC is, at this moment in history, using its great power for good – for state protection rather than State Capture. When the ANC Youth League in Limpopo, for instance, threatened the “mother of all marches” in the province after it was announced that the quarantine site for the Wuhan repatriates was going to be in the outskirts of Polokwane, Zweli Mkhize — a powerful man in the ANC — shushed them and crushed their plans very swiftly.
After the Wuhan plane landed he took to his Twitter handle to post a video branded with an “ANC Limpopo” logo to welcome the repatriates.

The government has been calling the media its “partners” in the fight against Covid-19. To the ears of someone who reported on HIV in South Africa in the 1990s and 2000s, that has been pretty surreal. I’m sure the “partners” thing has seemed equally strange to those in the media who’ve been reporting on State Capture and government corruption.

Okay, enough Kumbaya for now: As a journalist and editor, I of course am well aware of how rapidly this newfound “partnership” could end. But for now, it’s happening. We’re all in it together, on the same side. For now, I’m witnessing true leadership from the ANC.

We can’t stop this virus from spreading, but we can slow down the pace at which it spreads, to help our health system cope.

We’re moving into lockdown, testing sites are increasing, there are contact tracing teams, quarantine sites-in-the-making and relatively good communication systems that will hopefully prevent panic.

Yet, sadly, the ANC government’s criminal inaction two decades ago is likely to have a bearing on South Africa’s ability to combat Covid-19 successfully: We now have one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, something that could have been prevented if we had put people on treatment earlier.

Our latest household survey shows that four out of 10 people with HIV are still not on treatment, which increases the chances that their immune systems are weak and potentially vulnerable to attacks from viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.
Lessons don’t emerge only from other countries. With regards to Covid-19 and our response in the coming weeks and months and maybe even years, our own history just may be our greatest teacher. DM

This story was first published by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism.
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COVID-19 AND NBN

Kendall Lovett submitted this letter to The Age - INDEPENDENT - ALWAYS - under the heading "NBN needs to help us working from home" and The Age letters editor decided that he/she knew best. The Age letter appears below the original letter.

To: Letters Editor, The Age,

From: Kendall Lovett, (address and phone number provided)

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus) has highlighted the need for an NBN that is adequately equipped to facilitate telehealth, tele-education and teleworking.

We need a better digital network for the current crisis --the pandemic as well as the floods and bush fires which preceded it.

According to Laurie Patton, former Internet Australia executive director, the federal government should immediately fund the NBN company to employ suitably qualified people being retrenched, train them and deploy them to start upgrading the FTTN (copper wire) connections so that everyone has access to fast broadband.

That would be a step in the right direction now and help working people at home during the pandemic while fixing an underlying flaw that limits the effectiveness of the NBN.

Signed: Kendall Lovett.

-----------------------------------

Better network priority

COVID-19 has highlighted the need for an NBN that is adequately equipped to facilitate telehealth, tele-education and teleworking.

We need a better digital network for the crisis – the pandemic as well as the floods and bushfires which preceded it.

According to Laurie Patton, former Internet Australia executive director, the federal government should immediately fund the NBN company to employ suitably qualified people being retrenched, train them and deploy them to start upgrading the FTTN (copper wire) connections so that everyone has access to fast broadband.

Kendall Lovett, Preston