Category: Lockdown

… to allow Ministers Dlamini-Zuma and Zweli Mkhize an opportunity to file adequate responses.

The Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA), Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, was served papers three weeks ago and has failed to submit a response, although she intends opposing the matter.

Furthermore, the Minister of Health, Zweli Mkhize has belatedly launched an application to intervene in the matter. DearSA will call on the Minister for his reasons to persist with the State of Disaster and ongoing health precautions, despite conflicting evidence and opinions regarding the effectiveness.

No formal responses in court papers have so far been received from either party.

DearSA intends refiling its court action challenging lockdown extensions early in the New Year to allow the government sufficient time to prepare their responses.

“We decided it would avoid a lot of time-wasting technical arguments to refile the case in January 2021, after the court’s break, by which time the two relevant ministries will have had time to formulate their responses,” says DearSA director Rob Hutchinson. “This is a case that must be brought before the courts, as this is something that we know has huge public support, given the responses to the various campaigns where we canvassed public opinions on the lockdowns and the impact they are having on the country.”

“It is likely that had we gone to court on 1 December, denying the ministers an opportunity to respond, the court would have kicked us out with costs – putting an end to any further challenges from anyone. Furthermore, our bank account was frozen for reasons unknown. However, the delay places us in a far stronger position in Jan as there will be substantially more data in our favour.”

DearSA is working closely together with Liberty Fighters Network and PANDA to ensure a successful approach in Jan.

On Monday 16 November, DearSA served papers on the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. DearSA asked the Pretoria High Court to declare unlawful and set aside the lockdown extension declared by the Minister on 14 November 2020. Several groups plan to join DearSA as friends of the court, including Pandemic Data and Analytics (PANDA) and Liberty Fighters Network (LFN). Other groups have also indicated their desire to join the court action.

Given the delay in having the court action heard, there is a likelihood that the government will extend the lockdown yet again over the Christmas period.

The tool being used by the government to impose these lockdowns is the Disaster Management Act, which is intended for disasters of a temporary nature, and should not be used as a blunt instrument with which to severely restrict the Constitutional rights of South Africans, such as the right to earn a living, move around, and assemble.

Hutchinson says DearSA is obligated to bring this court challenge to determine the limits of government power and prevent further infringements of human rights.

The overwhelming majority of respondents to various DearSA participation campaigns believe the government has overstepped its powers and that the lockdowns represent an abuse of power.

The rationale behind the DearSA court action is that the original purpose for imposing lockdowns – to prevent the health system being overwhelmed by a virus about which we knew little at the start of the lockdowns – has been achieved. Evidence of this is the fact that the government has closed down temporary health facilities that were hastily assembled for this purpose. The health system has not been overwhelmed, notwithstanding a rise in infections in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape.

DearSA’s court papers argue that lockdown measures have had a devastating impact on the SA economy. In the first three months of lockdown, GDP contracted by more than 16%, giving an annualised decline of -51%. In the second quarter of 2020 alone, SA shed 2.2 million jobs, according to Statistics SA.

The court action challenges the rationality of government’s catastrophic actions on the economic welfare of the country, in the name of saving South Africans from a virus which the World Health Organisation (WHO) calculates has had a global infection fatality rate of less than 0.2%.

“We have decided to give Minister Dlamini-Zuma and Health Minister Mkhize time to formulate their responses to our court papers. This is a case that we believe is vital to the future wellbeing of the country as it will determine the limits of state power no and in the future when it comes to disasters of this nature,” says Hutchinson. “Our case is not going away. It must, and will, be heard early in the New Year.”

Intro: The lockdown restrictions are illogical and are done without Parliamentary oversight

Participative democracy group Dear South Africa has filed an urgent application in the Pretoria High Court to set aside the lockdown extension imposed on 13 November 2020.

The court application says the lockdown extensions are illogical and are being done without Parliamentary oversight, as required by the Constitution.

The only respondent in the case is the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. She has until 18 November 2020 to oppose the matter.

Dear South Africa is also asking the court to declare the latest lockdown extension under the Disaster Management Act unlawful.

“South Africa is no longer faced with the uncertainties that it was confronted with when the initial state of disaster was enacted,” says Daniel Eloff of Hurter Spies, the attorneys representing Dear South Africa. “Consequently, government cannot continue to piggyback on a state of disaster for which the underlying and motivating reason has largely dispersed eight months since the initial declaration of the national state of disaster.”

In an affidavit before the court, Dear South Africa director Rob Hutchinson argues that Constitutional rights have been curtailed by the disaster regulations, including the rights to freedom of movement, residence, assembly, economic activity and education.

Businesses were shut down at the start of the Covid lockdown, schools were closed, and citizens’ rights to move and practice their professions and trades were severely curtailed.

“While many of these restrictions on fundamental rights have been lifted, the (minister) has imposed these restrictions without parliamentary oversight and may reimpose them. The (minister) is empowered to extend the state of disaster monthly ad infinitum without such oversight,” says the court application.

Regulations under the act may only be made to: protect or provide relief to the public; protect property; prevent or combat disruption; deal with the destructive and other effects of the disaster.

The original purpose of the lockdowns which commenced in March 2020 was to “flatten the curve” and slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Little was known about the virus at the time. Now we know much more.

Lockdowns will not save the lives of those who contract COVID-19 and do not require hospitalisation, according to Dear South Africa. Expert analysis by medical experts and epidemiologists conclude that the case fatality rate from the virus is 0% for those under 19, and for adults under 50 it is 0.5%.

The case fatality rate for SA is 2.7%. The World Health Organisation (WHO) noted on 22 October 2020 that 10% of the world’s population were reckoned to have been infected with the virus. Of these, 1.3 million people have died as of 14 November 2020, an infection fatality rate of 0.17%.

The lockdown measures have had a devastating impact on the SA economy. During April, May and June, when the most severe lockdown restrictions were in place, gross domestic product contracted by more than 16% giving an annualised decline of -51%. By comparison, in 2009, during the global financial crisis, the annualised decline was -6.1%. In the second quarter of 2020 alone, SA shed 2.2 million jobs, according to StatSA.

The South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (SACEMA) provided models to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), though it was not aware that these models were being used to inform policy. SACEMA abandoned its model soon after it was published and advised that it was not a tool for decision-making. That model’s replacement, the NICD’s “Epi Model” has not been updated since June 2020 and also appears to have been abandoned. When last updated, it forecast 40 000 deaths by the end of November 2020 – which has also proven to be wildly inaccurate. The actual number of fatalities currently sits at just above 20 000.

South Africans appear to have a high level of compliance with recommended rules regarding sanitation, wearing of masks and social distancing.

Dear South Africa says the recent extension of the lockdown is an “administrative act” which is reviewable by a court in terms of the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA). Reasons given for seeking to set aside and declare the extension unlawful include:

• They were not rationally connected to the purpose for which they were taken
• Irrelevant considerations were taken into account, or relevant considerations ignored
• The extension is unconstitutional and unlawful.

While it may have been rational to have declared a state of disaster in March, much has changed since then. It is no longer rational to have the declaration in place and it should not have been extended.

The state of disaster grants the executive the power to pass draconian legislation which weakens the rights of all those who live in South Africa. The state of disaster can be extended ad infinitum by the minister without a requirement of parliamentary oversight. This has occurred, and continues to occur, which undermines our constitutional democracy, premised on a genuine separation of powers, says the court application.

If a second wave of infections occurs, the state has had ample time to prepare for this and a new state of disaster could be declared based on new circumstances that may arise. “It is improper to keep the current state of disaster perpetually in force on the basis that some new disaster may occur on some unknown date,” says the application.

Letter to Minister Dlamini-Zuma (current challenge)

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Written by Ciaran Ryan

Four months into the pandemic we have a clearer picture of the social and economic impacts of the lockdown.

It’s a catastrophe. The lockdown could kill far more people than the virus. At end July 2020, SA had 8,000 deaths from just short of 500,000 confirmed cases, for a case fatality rate of 1.6%.  Far more people will die this year from tuberculosis and diabetes than coronavirus.

Yet more people will die from poverty-induced illnesses in the years to come. An April analysis by Pandemic Data Analysis (PANDA) estimated years of life lost to the pandemic to be 14 million, or 30X more than from the virus itself.

Bear in mind that around 450,000 people die in SA each year from all causes (446,554 in 2017 and 470,396 in 2016). Coronavirus is hardly going to move this needle, even slightly.

In late March 2020, the government’s official data modellers suggested 351,000 could die from Covid-19 in South Africa. PANDA was hastily formed to challenge this wild spreadsheet modelling. The team comprises actuaries, data analysts, economists and other specialists. PANDA challenged the government’s models, suggesting that it was more likely that 10,000-20,000 would die from the virus. Based on the current figures, PANDA is right on target as the virus infection curve maps a typical epidemic decline tail.

“What has happened in the last four months is the greatest social injustice in SA’s history since apartheid,” says PANDA co-founder Nick Hudson. “The lockdown is based on bad science, poor modelling and even worse judgment on the part of the government.”

The real effects will be felt in the years to come, and it won’t be from Covid. It will be from poverty and its associated effects.

It is not difficult to understand why: an estimated 6 million South Africans have suffered income contraction so far this year, and the figure will likely rise to 10 million by September. It is well known that poverty shortens lifespan. Economist Dawie Roodt estimated roughly 300,000 deaths would arise from lockdown-induced poverty, based on examples of rising death rates in countries such as Greece after the 2008 financial collapse. There is an undeniable link between economic decline and death rates.

Yet the headlines tell us that SA has the fifth-highest number of infections in the world. That’s grossly misleading, says Hudson, and an inevitable consequence of increased testing. A more instructive statistic is to look at deaths per million of population, in which case SA ranks number 36 in the world (and 22^nd in terms of absolute deaths).

With the benefit of four months’ worth of data from around the world, we now know that there was little difference between countries embracing a hard lockdown and those that didn’t. The outcomes were more or less the same. There is simply no sign of the dramatic suppression of the reproduction rate that modellers assumed. Yet government has abrogated its responsibilities to a team of data modellers and epidemiologists who seem to be top-heavy with error-prone alarmists.

Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan and Anti-Fragility, is dismissive of economists and advisors who suffer no harm when the advice they peddle turns out to be wrong. We are in such a time now. Advisors urging extended lockdowns, as if we are living through the Black Plague, will still draw their government-guaranteed salaries at the end of the month, dispensing their wisdom via Zoom. If they were wrong at the start of the lockdown, why should we trust them now?

When the data proves them wrong, they do what self-preservation demands: double down by warning of a second and third spike in infections, lasting perhaps years.

SA is not alone in heeding advice from sources that deserve far more scrutiny than they are getting. UK epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who had Covid-19 himself, had to walk back his original outrageous projections of 500,000 UK Covid-19 deaths, when in fact the virus has claimed less than a tenth of this.

President Donald Trump’s coronavirus czar Dr Anthony Fauci co-wrote a paper in March this year arguing (correctly) that the virus affects predominantly the old and the very sick. He predicted the mortality from Covid would not be significantly out of line with a seasonal flu. “It was remarkable that he predicted this at such an early stage in the spread of the virus,” says Hudson. “But ever since then he has been lapping up every minute of fear-mongering that he can, He’s a panic porn artist.”

Initially, most of the country seemed supportive of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s lockdown in the face of a viral attack the likes of which none of us had ever experienced. Yet we hoped it was temporary and the rights we voluntarily suspended – such as the right to work, move around freely, drink wine, smoke cigarettes, gather with friends – would be returned intact within a matter of months.

Now we’re not so sure. History teaches us that rights surrendered are seldom returned unalloyed.

Cabinet ministers and their government advisors who call for an extended lockdown based on erroneous data must be held to account. Their decisions will cause an unprecedented economic contraction of between 9% and 13% this year, but the effects in terms of poverty and declining wellness will linger for years. Blaming this on the virus and not the lockdown is the height of dishonesty.

By the end of June 2020 it was already clear that the infection curve in the Western Cape had peaked and was in decline. The same is now happening in Gauteng.

The type of modelling used in SA and elsewhere in the world is based on a completely erroneous reading of the actual data. It’s not that they lacked sufficient data on which to model their predictions. The Diamond Princess cruise ship presented data analysts with laboratory-type conditions with which to track and monitor the virus. This was a cruise ship sailing around the Pacific with 7,000 passengers, a large percentage of them old. In total, there were 12 deaths, all of them aged over 65. That’s a mortality rate of 0.2% of the ship population (in an environment in which it was difficult for anyone on self-isolate).

That presents an accurate picture of Covid’s spread in a confined environment. Yet senior academics trying to draw attention to the bogus science behind the global lockdown have been shut out of polite media circles, among them Dr Michael Levitt (born in Pretoria) of Stanford University, and Professor John Ioannidis, also of Stanford. Youtube has censored many who have questioned World Health Organisation (WHO) orthodoxy. There are dozens more senior scientists forced to get their message out on fringe podcasts and non-censored platforms. This is the “spirit of the times” in which we live, says Hudson.

Back in 1960 US-Hungarian psychiatrist Professor Thomas Szasz wrote The Myth of Mental Illness, arguing that undesirable behaviour was being medicalised and reclassified as “illness” with no science to back it up. He coined the term the “therapeutic state”. He warned us 60 years ago that the state wants dominion over our bodies and our thoughts., and would force “treatments” on us for the greater social good.

It seemed a long shot back then. Now it seems all too imminent.

Under no circumstances should a lockdown be permitted, says Hudson. “If there is a virus on the loose, people must choose their own risk-mitigation strategies. If you are afraid of the virus, then self-isolate, but you cannot force others to do the same.

“There’s something terribly wrong when you deny ordinary people agency in their own lives and their own health. People should be able to choose to stay at home, but have no right to force you to stay home. We want herd immunity, because that is how all epidemics are conquered.” It appears that the Western Cape is fast reaching that point in precisely the fashion projected by PANDA.

We need to demand our government acts on sound explanations and data. Because when this blows over and South Africans survey the wreckage, they will look for someone to blame.

This comes after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced an immediate ban of the sale of alcohol and a curfew, forcing South Africans to stay home between 9pm and 4am.

Theto Mahlakoana EWN

The public has been invited to make comments on the recently amended regulations to level three of the lockdown, with government promising to consider their input.

This comes after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced an immediate ban of the sale of alcohol and a curfew, forcing South Africans to stay home between 9pm and 4am.

The government said that the decision to enforce stricter regulations followed the spike in new COVID-19 infections and related deaths.

With many of the existing regulations, including the prohibition of the sale of tobacco products and the non-visitation of family members, are under review in courts across the country. The government has chosen to tread carefully by consulting the public.

Although the comments will only be considered with the laws already enforced, Cooperative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said that the decisions were made in the best interests of South Africans.

Government has also defended its decision to criminalise the non-wearing of masks.

On the decision to ban visits among family members, the national COVID-19 command council has explained that this was due to the loophole this created for people to host parties and other platforms that had led to the surge in COVID-19 positive cases in some parts of the country.

BY ERNEST MABUZA – TimesLIVE

Stringent lockdown measures announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday, including the suspension of liquor sales and the return of a night curfew were being imposed to limit the spread of Covid-19.

Co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said this in a follow-up briefing on Monday.

She said though SA was number 25 in terms of population size in the world, it is now ranked 10th highest in the number of Covid-19 cases.

She said SA ranked higher in terms of the number of new cases per day. “We must do everything to protect this beautiful nation of ours.”

Dlamini-Zuma said the announcement by Ramaphosa on Sunday was to combat the spread of the virus.

She said it was now a criminal offence not to wear a mask in a public place.

“When you wear a mask, you are not protecting only yourself but people about you,” she said.

She said if one did not have a formal mask, one could use a cloth or any material to cover the mouth and nose.

“Now it is mandatory. It is mandatory to wear a face mask because it is one of the measures at our disposal to protect ourselves and to protect people about us.

“The provision in the regulations now says the mandatory wearing of the face mask or any face mask, cloth mask or anything that you can use to cover your mouth and nose while you are in public.”

She said the regulation also says one cannot enter any form of public transport without wearing a mask. She said social distancing still remained important and people should avoid activities that disregarded those responsibilities.

“That is why social activities are still not allowed. So one of the things that we know becomes difficult when people are sitting together and continue to wear masks is also alcohol.”

She said when people are drinking in groups, they let their guard down.

“Their masks will go and social distancing will go. The spread will happen and we have seen it in many instances.”

She said drinking of alcohol socially brought people together and discouraged them from using masks, from social distancing and sanitising.

“More importantly when people have taken liquor, they get drunk, they engage in irresponsible behaviour, some of them become violent, they start fighting, killing each other.

“Even at home they become violent. When they get into their cars, they start driving recklessly, creating accidents.”

She said those people had to be rushed to hospitals, which means they were taking space that should be used to look after people who are ill and people who have Covid.

“Some of them need theatre, ICU beds and ventilators and taking away from those who are ill and who need it from Covid-19.”

Alcohol-related emergency cases diverted the services of medical personnel who should be in ICU looking after people with Covid-19.

“What happens then is the ICU gets full, beds in hospital get full and people who need those beds will not have access to them. It is for that reason that the cabinet has decided we need to suspend the sale of alcohol transportation and dispensing of alcohol,” Dlamini-Zuma said.

Dlamini-Zuma said the government was not limiting people’s rights.

“The government is trying to limit the spread of the virus because the spread happens through the movement of people. The virus is moved by people. It is spread by people. It is me who moves it. It is you who will move it. Part of limiting the movement is part of limiting the spread of virus,” Dlamini-Zuma said.

She said it was for that reason that the curfew was brought back from 9pm to 4am. Interprovincial travel is not allowed, except for funerals, work and business travel.