Mayor submits comments rejecting national government’s proposed permanent Covid-19 regulatory regime

21 April 2022  

I have submitted comments on behalf of the City of Cape Town, rejecting the national government’s draft regulations relating to the Surveillance and Control of Notifiable Medical Conditions, which aims to make certain Covid-19-related restrictions a permanent feature of our lives. The comments can be viewed here.

The draft regulations will normalise and embed the abnormal state of affairs that has existed since March 2020 even though deaths from Covid-19 remain relatively low and most of the rest of the world has already returned to life without any lockdown restrictions.

The regulations will transfer state-of-disaster-like powers to the National Health Act, to be exercised by the Health Minister without critical Parliamentary consent. Simply put, they are an attempt to make the State of Disaster permanent through ordinary laws, and must be rejected.

The City has instead called on the Department to develop and issue evidence-based guidelines for health practitioners and health authorities. Throughout the pandemic, the national government demonstrated its inclination to implement haphazard and ever-changing regulations that destroyed livelihoods and unfairly restricted the liberty of South Africans, with no regard for scientific evidence.

The new regulations will mean a constant threat of further irrational decision-making by the national government, which could only be challenged through lengthy legal action.

The draft regulations are based on assumptions about Covid-19 and containment measures that are outdated and not supported by our leading health academics. They have no logical connection to protecting lives or the integrity of public health services. They also do not take account of the fact that vaccines are freely and widely available. All of these facts raise very real concerns about the likelihood of further irrational restrictions.

South Africans have suffered terrible economic hardship as a result of the national lockdown, which persisted far longer and more severely than was justified. Our economy has still not recovered to early 2020 levels, and unemployment is at a record high. We cannot allow this to happen again.

Accordingly, I call on the Department of Health to abandon the current draft regulations and instead develop and issue evidence-based guidelines for health practitioners and health authorities as outlined in our 17 page submission.

Issued by Media Office, City of Cape Town, 21 April 2022