Earlier this year, doctors and epidemiologists in South Africa’s economic capital were bracing for the worst. A new coronavirus strain was surging across the country, thousands of holidaymakers were due to return from Covid-19 hot spots, and one in three coronavirus tests was coming back positive.
Then something unexpected happened: Covid-19 cases started dropping.
Since mid-January, confirmed Covid-19 infections in South Africa have fallen from a record of nearly 22,000 a day to around 1,000, without a large-scale vaccination campaign or stringent lockdown. Fewer than 5% of Covid-19 tests are finding traces of the virus, a sign that health agencies are missing fewer cases. The government has lifted most of its remaining virus restrictions for the country of 60 million people.
The cause of this steep decline in cases remains somewhat of a mystery. As in other countries that have at some point experienced surprising drops in Covid-19 cases—such as India, Pakistan and some parts of Brazil—epidemiologists and virologists are piecing together different explanations for why the outbreak in South Africa isn’t following patterns set elsewhere. . . .
The simplest explanation for the sudden mid-January drop in cases is that sections of the population had reached a level of immunity that made it harder for the virus to jump between different groups, said Jinal Bhiman, a principal medical scientist at the NICD.
So the theory that there were a lot more asymptomatic cases leading to immunity than we realized is still quite plausible, there and here. Likewise the notion that many people have T-cell based immunity but not antibodies that show up on tests. Also there and here. Meaning that herd immunity could come much sooner than predicted. Also there and here.
Even the New York Times is running this: ‘I’d Much Rather Be in Florida.’ What’s interesting are the Democrats praising Ron DeSantis.
Helen and I were in Miami a couple of weeks ago. It was less wide-open than some press accounts suggested — we even saw a surprisingly large number of (crazy) people wearing masks while walking on the beach. But it was much more lively than NYC or LA. In fact, we chatted with some Spring Breakers from Beverly Hills who said they were there because “California sucks now.”
Meanwhile, the NYT story slams people for not wearing masks on the beach. There’s zero science supporting a need to wear masks on the beach, as The Atlantic noted recently: “Throughout the past year, traditional and social media have been caught up in a cycle of shaming—made worse by being so unscientific and misguided. How dare you go to the beach? newspapers have scolded us for months, despite lacking evidence that this posed any significant threat to public health.”
Treating masks as some sort of voodoo talisman isn’t science, but it’s very common among those who profess to “believe in science.”