READER LETTER | Don't bring them home

President Cyril Ramaphosa's decision to repatriate South Africans who have been in Wuhan, China, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, is an emotional and political reaction. It carries an enormous public health risk to the population inside South Africa. What should guide the president are not political calculations, but the prevention of the virus from spreading into the country.

 One of the measures he should be taking is not moving these people around; he should treat them in place until they are guaranteed no longer infectious. This is not about nationalities. It is about the spread of a dangerous virus through human contact. Moving people around increases the risk of exposure for uninfected people. There is a lot we do not know about the virus. The state of California has just discovered a case where the source of the infection is unknown. If East London was ground zero for infections in South Africa we would not be moving people from East London to uninfected areas of the country. That surely runs against common sense management of infectious diseases.

Infected people in China are all receiving the same medical treatment, irrespective of nationality. There is nothing different the South African medical system can offer that is not already being implemented by the Chinese.

Moreover, the Chinese have greater resources than we do. They have a pharmaceutical base to manufacture the needed drugs and the resources to build new hospitals to fight the disease. In contrast, our Treasury is so bankrupt it probably cannot afford to buy drugs if needed. This is a problem the country faced in the early days of the Aids epidemic, when we could not afford to buy drugs to respond to that epidemic. Add to that the economic challenges of feeding large, isolated populations who cannot feed themselves.

What we do know is that there are no failsafe methods of moving infected people from one area to another. The US tried citizen evacuation with what were thought to be safe and effective methods. A whistle-blower has reported that the personnel who were supposed to evacuate the infected people were themselves exposed to the virus in transit because of systemic failures.

The Chinese offer to treat South Africans in China minimised the chance that the greater South African population would be exposed to the virus. It could have saved us from spending billions to fight a battle the Chinese authorities were willing to shield us from.

— Wongaletu Vanda, via e-mail