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    Re: Covid stats for South Africa Archived Message

    Posted by margo on August 10, 2020, 12:42 pm, in reply to "Covid stats for South Africa"

    Hi Mary, I saw your earlier request for my reaction to Andrew Harding's BBC piece.
    Not one of his worst, to be honest.
    My criticism would be, rather, that it's light fluff, which doesn't get to grips with how the COVID focus has badly compromised TB, HIV, cancer and other health programmes, which kill far more people - and how contradictory and ill thought-out COVID restrictions have impacted a limping economy.

    Also, how South Africa (after resisting an IMF loan for years) was slid into an IMF loan with no transparency, in the midst of the crisis.

    Also, how South Africa's draconian COVID ban on alcohol sales resulted in a massive drop in hospital admissions for violence and car accidents - and sighs of relief from frontline doctors and nurses, who'd begged for the ban in order to be able to deal with projected COVID crisis.

    South Africa's abuse of alcohol - and its link with one of world's highest crime, trauma, rape and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome figures - has been laid bare. The alcohol ban - in its fourth month now - cannot last forever. It's notable that the government is not planning for The Day After the Lifting of the Alcohol Ban, ie. social programmes to educate and rehabilitate SA's alcoholics.

    Some SA doctors are now noting Russia's impressive fightback against debilitating alcoholism and wondering how to get the SA government to pay attention, given SA has fifth highest consumption rate in the world. 'Alcohol is used here as 'medicine' for the poverty-stricken and broken-hearted', as a doctor friend describes it.

    Russian alcohol consumption is down 40% since 2003, since Putin included curbs on alcohol sales as well as a social focus on promotion of healthy lifestyles. His policy has seen increased life expectancies in Russia, which reached a historic peak in 2018: 78 for women, 68 for men. In the 1990s, male life expectancy was 57 years.
    WHO figures show that Russian adults now drink less alcohol on average than their French and German counterparts.

    Andrew Harding's other article ["South Africa coronavirus lockdown: Is the alcohol ban working"?] also skims surfaces and doesn't offer us journalism that digs deeper into systemic and social context



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