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Please refrain from rushing to your local liquor store in a panic, and loading your trolley with enough booze to see you through the year.

At the very least, wait for the fake booze ban voicenote that is sure to do the rounds in the coming weeks, like the rest of the country.

Jokes aside, there is now talk of moving to a stricter lockdown level, as an uptick in positive cases combined with fears over two variants of concern identified in the country has experts on high alert.

Earlier this week, reports News24, the Free State Department of Health announced that the province is already experiencing a third wave, and Gauteng officials have spoken about bracing themselves for what comes next.

Those two variants – the B.1.617.2, first detected in India, and the B.1.1.7, first detected in the UK – are now circulating locally:

Dr Asmal Dasoo, convenor of the Progressive Health Forum, said without mass vaccination, the country should move to a stricter lockdown level that would further limit gatherings…

“There are no other tools left. We certainly don’t have any vaccines; we are pretty much where we were with the other two previous waves. We are in the same place we were over 12 months ago…No one in South Africa should be comfortable being in a group of more than ten people unless those people are part of their household.”

It’s quite something to hop on social media and see friends abroad talking about the ease of getting a jab in the UK or US, for example, whilst we still haven’t completed phase 1 here in South Africa.

Wits University health and security expert Professor Alex van der Heever agreed with Dasoo:

“If the current trends continue, we will need to introduce restrictions targeted at gatherings. In the absence of a vaccine rollout, there will be no other option.”

We’ve grown wearily accustomed to government failure at every turn, as well as hollow promises, and Dasoo says some form of apology from our government regarding the vaccine rollout is in order:

“There has to be a reckoning; we are so far behind in terms of vaccination, and even our peer countries are far ahead of us. We’ve had a combination of bad luck but also some wrong decisions…Maybe it is time the MAC and the health department come clean with people and say we screwed up, mea culpa.

We have a top leadership that is not quite focused on what this pandemic is, partly because they are not badly affected themselves. I don’t know what it will take for them to take it seriously.”

Meanwhile, the ANC is engaged in infighting over the suspension of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, who is as effective as a political leader as he is with a chessboard in front of him.

If you believe that, as promised, in excess of 40 million South Africans will be vaccinated by the end of February next year, you’re certainly optimistic.

Modelling what the third wave might look like is also quite tricky, with those new variants throwing some huge variables into the mix.

This from TimesLIVE:

In the case of the latest “third wave” estimates, released by the SA Covid-19 Modelling Consortium last week, it was emphasised that none of the five scenarios they generated included the presence of a new variant.

They cautioned, however, that “the emergence of a highly transmissible new variant may result in a third wave of the same size as the second wave or worse, especially if the variant provides an opportunity for immune escape”.

That’s a worst-case scenario, because of the uncertainty around the variants, but is still cause for concern.

At present, four cases of the B.1.617.2 variant have been detected in Gauteng and KZN, and 11 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant in the Western Cape, KZN, and Gauteng.

For those sitting in Cape Town’s more affluent suburbs, and thinking they’re insulated from it all, consider what the Western Cape’s head of health, Dr Keith Cloete, told CapeTalk earlier this week:

“One of the key markers we track is when we send tests to the laboratory, what proportion of the tests comes back positive.

But during the course of last week in District 4, the proportion of that test that came back from the lab…in the subset of the test that is primarily done by the private sector in the metro, and specifically in certain affluent areas, it started going above 5%.

It is an early marker of concern and we are watching it carefully.”

It’s all so damn tiresome.

Here we are, on day 411 of living under some or other form of lockdown, and it’s the same scenarios on repeat.

If only those who had blundered their way through the vaccine procurement and rollout process were held accountable, either through legal means or at the ballot box.

Until then, more of the same.

[sources:news24&timeslive&capetalk]