Any lockdown that prohibits certain categories of gatherings while permitting others will inevitably lead to irrational results. How then to limit the spread of the contagion? Is it possible to find more effective ways toward an ethics & technology of care for self and others?

A comparative look at responses to the lockdown in Africa suggests that while the ZA response is exemplary in biomedical terms, it is unusually technocratic and top down, conceiving of the relation between state mostly as disciplinary in nature

As my colleague @DianaMitln points out, it is all too easy to forget that #publichealth is a social good that is produced *together*, requiring partnership between state and society.

All the ventilators and contact tracing in the world are not going to help if you cannot also mobilise citizens' capacities for self care and co-responsibility at the level of community and household

Unfortunately this level has seemed sadly lacking in SA. There has been comparatively little emphasis on mobilising or relying on informal communities' significant capacities for solidarity and self organisation https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32333243/ 

Instead, the SA #covid response is characterised by an almost exclusive response on acting through the coercive and regulatory powers of the state. A middle class #topdown #lockdown

In the initial stages of the pandemic - when the point was to *crush* the curve & to stop the spread of the virus from the wealthy suburbs where the après-skiers lived - a total lockdown made sense as a kind of influx control in reverse, to keep vulnerable poor communities safe

But as these early attempts at containment failed, we're increasingly in a situation where this statist response leads to counterproductive and damaging results: the proliferation of bizarre regulations, the destruction of informal livelihoods, the reliance on SANDF coercion.

These contradictions become more difficult, not easier, as we move out of harsh lockdown into the limbo of State 3: as interaction & interconnection increase ambiguities and complications proliferate. A regulatory nightmare, in which almost every decision is open to critique.

From this perspective, as @MarijkeDuT pointed out the decision to allow religious gatherings could be seen as step in the right direction - a recognition of the role of civil society to help people deal with fear, anxiety, grief and uncertainty. https://twitter.com/MarijkeDuT/status/1265375722643824644