Shabir Mahdi, one of our most eminent health scientists did a presentation to the Wits council on Friday afternoon. His presentation slides are available on this link: http://www.wits.ac.za/covid19/latest-news/test-test-test-says-wits-academic.html

Here are the central takeaways from his presentation:1. The pandemic will be with us for months & may become part of the annual illness cycles. It will not be contained until about a third of the population get infected & develop an immunity, what has come to be known as herding.

2. The great success story in managing this pandemic is South Korea which had developed a capacity after the SARS epidemic 17 years ago. It did not undertake a lockdown, but instead focussed on widespread proactive testing of the population, quarantine and social distancing.

3. The deep socio-economic divides & our spatial community organization inhibits social distancing, especially in townships. We must grapple with this reality. It requires proactive testing in these areas & creating the circumstances for quarantining & isolation of the infected.

4. Lockdowns in deeply unequal societies like SA have to be accompanied by massive socio-economic support including grants, food parcels, access to abuse shelters etc. Otherwise, the cure can be more devastating than the disease. Witness the tragedy unfolding in India.

5. Also, the lockdown will not on its own contain the pandemic. It can extend the period of the infections which will enable us to mount a response.We still are likely to have as many infections, but over a longer timescale. But for it to be effective, we need widespread testing.

6. We not doing enough testing to effectively manage this pandemic. Like in South Korea,we need widespread proactive testing,especially in the townships, & the quarantining & isolation of those who are infected. Otherwise the pandemic will run rampant & overwhelm health services.

7. The current plans to procure equipment is not sufficient. They will come in too late to ramp up the testing. We need the testing now, not in 4 to 6 weeks. Moreover, our public health facilities are not sufficiently capacitated to meet the health challenge that is on its way.

8. We have to acknowledge the very deep skill deficits in our hospitals & public institutions.Decades of political appointments & deployments will now haunt us. But we can mitigate its effects if we enable public-private & state-civil society partnerships to manage this pandemic.

9. Lesson: we need to test, test & test.We need all hands on deck & all our facilities to assist. Currently universities have academic research labs that can be repurposed to undertake testing. If these labs were deployed for this purpose, we could increase tests by 5000 a day.

10. We should prioritize the deployment of the research labs at universities for testing.There is no time for turf wars.All role players must coordinate across instit. boundaries & use all available infrastructural resources for testing. This is the only way to contain the virus.