Ubuntu is SA’s chance of defeating Covid-19, says the government’s most sensible adviser on the pandemic.
Speaking to Nature, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, chairman of the Health Minister’s Advisory Committee, said that SA was based on ubuntu and that it is the precept that can save it.
“This virus exposes the flaws of our society. But I think when we get to a point where a sufficient number of other people have a parent, a member of a family circle, or someone in their neighborhood who has been in poor health or died of the virus, Americans are taken into collective action so they can join, Karim said.
“When the challenge didn’t seem so serious, when the blockade slowed down transmission, other people questioned restrictions like those of a nanny state.
But I think we will soon realize that the most productive coverage we have opposed to this virus is ubuntu, a South African word meaning ‘I am because you are’. I am because you are
“I saw that in HIV, when other people saw the deaths of their loved ones, it drove a change in behavior. As a country, we are built on the ubuntu precept. We’ll have to rediscover this, in a different way it won’t beat this virus. »
Karim told Nature that he still hoped that the number of Covid-19 cases in South Africa, which was 421,996 on Friday, would increase significantly, “perhaps exceeding one million.”
And he revealed the tension he had experienced as the scientist who told South Africans the severity of the pandemic.
“We hoped that SA would eventually have a ‘mojo’ that would make it bigger than other countries. But SA’s truth dictates otherwise,” he said.
“Large portions of our country do not have the ability to identify social estrangement and for others to wash their hands regularly. So we had to anticipate that we might not involve him, in the hope that we will.
“But when I presented the most likely situation to politicians and then to the public at Easter, I explained that we had to face a complicated fact: that we probably couldn’t involve the virus and that the spread would probably increase exponentially. … since we feel comfortable with the blocking restrictions. It was hard to tell that to the whole nation.
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