While I welcome President Cyril Ramaphosa’s “Vooma Vaccination Weekend”, intended to make it easy for people to get Covid jabs, I think his announcement of relaxed lockdown regulations which became effective from yesterday, was premature.
Giving people more time to buy alcohol and more time to stay out and mingle ‒ in bigger numbers ‒ is a recipe for disaster. With the threat of further waves of infection still hanging over us, I think this was ill-advised.
Even given the need to shore up the economy by fully opening up as many sectors as possible ‒ especially tourism and hospitality in anticipation of the summer holiday season ‒ I think the president has jumped the gun here.
Naturally I would dearly love to be proved wrong.
Fortunately, he followed up news of the relaxed restrictions by announcing the vaccination drive.
However, this will only be of comfort to me if sufficiently large numbers of people take advantage of the opportunity and get the jabs.
And given the fairly slow up-take so far, I’m not overly enthusiastic. But, again, I hope to be proved wrong.
Perhaps I’m just jaded from Covid fatigue because I usually have a pretty positive outlook, but I believe we should have waited for the current trend of reducing infection numbers to play out a bit longer before moving to adjusted Level 1.
1 800 infections a day while only one-fifth of the adult population is fully vaccinated is still a bit much, I think.
The Independent on Saturday