[imagesource: Reuters]

On Sunday night, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that South Africa was returning to alert level 1.

That brings with it an easing of many restrictions, including a reduction in the curfew hours (now midnight until 4AM), and an increase in the number of people permitted at indoor and outdoor gatherings.

You can see the full list here.

We’ve been here before, and we didn’t exactly nail responsible behaviour under our previous alert level 1 spell, but this time we come armed with vaccines, right?

Sort of, although talk of a third wave remains, and according to Prof Shabir Madhi, lead investigator on the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trial in South Africa, we are unlikely to reach our 2021 COVID-19 herd immunity target.

Madhi, a professor of vaccinology at Wits University, said we should “recalibrate” expectations around COVID-19 jabs during a leadership dialogue hosted by the Wits Business School yesterday.

More from TimesLIVE:

Madhi [below] said the easing of regulations just before the Easter season could lead to the third wave arriving sooner than expected.

“If we allow mass gatherings towards Easter, we might see a resurgence at the beginning of May. Predictions were that we might see it about June as we head into winter,” he said.

Image: Wits University

Madhi added that the notion that the country would be able to achieve herd immunity through vaccination this year would not materialise, but that vaccines would minimise severe disease and deaths.

He said the immediate focus for 2021 should be centred on the vaccination of high-risk groups, which itself will allow the country to return to some normality.

In his 8PM address to the nation on Sunday, Ramaphosa was bullish about the vaccine rollout, but that’s not a view shared by everybody.

Both Ramaphosa and health minister Dr Zweli Mkhize have spoken about the government’s aim to vaccinate 67% of the population, which is around 40 million people, in order to achieve herd immunity by the end of 2021.

As things stand, that is rather unrealistic, according to Prof Alex van den Heever, chair of Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies at Wits University.

In an interview earlier this week with CapeTalk’s Refilwe Moloto, van den Heever laid out why:

“We are nowhere close to dealing with that problem [the slow roll-out of the vaccine programme].”

…Van den Heever says that the current roll-out strategy, in which 6 000 people a day are receiving their inoculations, would take 20 years to vaccinate the whole country.

“We have to get up to over 200 000 a day and we quite clearly very far from that.”

He adds that 2021 is going to be a year of ‘bouncing back and forth’ with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Oh, joy.

You can listen to van den Heever’s full interview below:

[sources:timeslive&capetalk]