Pretoria - The government's imposition of hard lockdowns was based solely on epidemiological information, resulting in serious human suffering such as food insecurity, unemployment and poverty.
To avoid the same situation in the event of future pandemics, both natural and social scientists undertook to work together in order to assist the government with integrated information.
The undertaking was made during last week’s Science Forum South Africa 2021 hosted virtually under the theme “Igniting Conversation about Science”.
An associate professor at UCT’s School of Economics, Reza Daniels, said the implementation of a lockdown level 5 of the regulations due to epidemiological models proved to be “onerous”.
“What it shows is that these regulations were onerous at the time, and therefore we had to think in a much more nuanced way about how to implement restrictions on legal businesses trading. This was very interesting, and this is why you need these social sciences surveys. You need them because they provide actual data, as opposed to projections that the epidemiologists will be able to offer,” Daniels said.
Under the National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey, known as Nids-Cram, Daniels conducted research into the socio-economic impact of Covid-19 during the lockdowns.
The research showed that approximately 10 million people and 3 million children were in households affected by hunger during April and May 2021.
“People experience hunger almost every day. This was the major contribution to the introduction of grants by the Treasury,” Daniels said.
At least 40% of adults living with children in food-insecure households showed signs of depressed mood in April 2021.
“We were able to correlate that with children in food-secure households. This, compared with 26% among those living with children in food secure households, was not significantly different from 12 months prior. This proportion rises to 51% when we take a lack of child access to food at school into account,” Daniels said.
Department of Science and Innovation director-general Dr Phil Mojwara invited social scientists to “get ready to work with natural scientists”.
“We have demonstrated the importance of the value of data and science in decision-making. The Covid-19 pandemic has helped us to do that and demonstrate that. I think this is the start of using data and science in its broadest sense to inform policies,” Mojwara said.
Dr Jabu Mtsweni, a technical leader of the National Policy Data Observatory, said combined data during the pandemic and vaccination roll-out times could help scientists to understand issues affecting people from both health and social impact perspectives.
“We know that issues are not health-matrix only, and so we need to combine or integrate those with other data sources. For example, understanding social relief, social impact and including other issues such as governance and economics,” Mtsweni said.
Ben Roberts, the acting research director within the Developmental, Capable and Ethical State division at the Human Science Research Council (HSRC), talked about social data produced by his entity in collaboration with the University of Johannesburg.
In a survey conducted by the two entities, it was found that at least 2% of people in the country objected to vaccinations for religious reasons.
Roberts said the survey results showed men were not more hesitant to get vaccinated than women.
“Among the hesitant, concerns about the side-effects and the efficacy of the vaccine are the predominant concerns,” he said.
Mark Collinson, from the South African population research infrastructure network, said: “Not having a reason to take vaccines is a common thing.”
Other people didn't want to vaccinate because they disliked needles and were worried about the side-effects.
“As time goes by there are people who are saying we don’t want vaccines because we don’t think they will work,” Collinson said.
However, he said avenues for changing minds may exist since concerns were largely not fact-based.
Related Video:
Pretoria News