“We are all concerned about the new Covid variant and owe our thanks to the South African scientists for identifying them before anyone else,” said Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera in a Facebook post on Sunday. “But the unilateral travel bans that are now being imposed on southern Africa are inappropriate. Measures must be based on science, not afrophobia.”
Afrophobia has been seen in some European media in the past few days. the Rheinpfalz printed a picture with an African mother and her child on the front page, with the caption: “The virus from Africa is with us.” What the newspaper apologized for, as did the colleagues from Spain, where La Tribune published a cartoon of a boat full of black viruses heading for Europe. Both caused great outrage in many African countries.
The virus was first detected in the sample from November 4 in South Africa, but that does not mean that it must also have originated here. Nevertheless, the rest of the world is currently outbidding itself with travel restrictions, including countries in southern Africa that have not yet had a proven case of Omikron on the red list. The UK meanwhile has almost 250 new cases, but there are virtually no travel restrictions in the UK. Which the WHO generally advises against.
“It is unlikely that travel restrictions can stop the spread of coronavirus as long as countries are unable to completely close their borders to travelers from all countries,” several South African scientists wrote in an article for the magazine Science. The entry bans could only postpone the spread by a few days or weeks, but no more.
The number of hospital admissions doubles
“It’s out there so it’s definitely going to spread,” said Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the US president. Even if little is known about the danger of the new virus and travel restrictions have only limited effect, they made sense, said Fauci, otherwise politics would have been crucified for “inactivity”. But now a rethink is necessary, since the virus has already spread in so many places. “For this reason I think that we can hopefully lift the ban as soon as possible”.
This is what all the heads of government in southern Africa, in whose countries tourism is collapsing, are demanding. Hundreds of thousands of tourists have canceled their bookings, the damage runs into billions. Many fear a repetition of history: When the beta variant was discovered in South Africa at the end of 2020, it took 291 days for the country to be removed from the red list of the UK’s most important tourism market, although the delta variant had already become the dominant one months earlier .
Now it is being replaced by Omikron. The number of cases is increasing sharply in South Africa. From 2300 new infections on Monday last week to 16,000 on Friday. It is likely that the new variant is much more infectious. Little can be said about the severity of the progression. “Our hospital admissions are doubling every day,” said Fareed Abdullah, director of the South African Medical Research Council. But the numbers are still at a relatively low level.
According to his investigations, the number of patients who had to be connected to a ventilator decreased in a number of hospitals, and the average length of stay also decreased. According to other studies, the proportion of interned children increased. The increased admission rate could be due to the increased caution of the parents, said the authors of the study. Really reliable statements about the dangerousness of Omikron could only be made in a few weeks.