The North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria ruled that many Lockdown Level 4 and 3 regulations are irrational and unlawful. Don’t get excited, though, judgement was suspended for 14 days, so all regulations still apply. But is the legal system really the best place to debate a response to a pandemic?
The answer is no. Every time.
A bit of background: Liberty Fighters took the government to court. This is an organization that doesn’t believe that SARS-CoV-2 presents a serious enough threat to shut down society. Reyno de Beer, its president, is also not thoroughly convinced that the hospitals are reporting correct COVID-19 fatalities.
Just poke around their Facebook Page for a bit to get a feel for these “renegades.”
But I digress. Again we have a flood of media reports that fail to address the important technicalities of the judgement.
The need for the initial lockdown was never argued and, crucially, the judgement acknowledges the rational link between closing schools, nightclubs and fitness centres and the objectives stated by the National Command Council.
This ruling gives an indication of the legal argument LFN brought to the court, but never explicitly states it so I assume that it was concentrated around the sale of tobacco products – BAT is currently fighting the cigarette ban in the same court and this was also highlighted in judgement.
So it seems we’re still splitting hairs on individual regulations and seeking scientific evidence from government to justify its reasoning.
I’ll say again: THIS IS A VIRUS THAT ATTACKS THE RESPIRATORY SYSTEM AND IS SPREAD THROUGH HUMAN CONTACT.
Hairdressers shouldn’t open because there is no way to limit unnecessary human contact. Public transport needs to run to ferry the vast majority of service workers to and from their places of business. We need to dispose of dead bodies and government is sympathetic to the tragedy of death and the innate desire for people to honour the fallen.
Are you really gonna argue that a haircut is an essential service? Really? Think about it. Think about all that is wrong in society if you really value how you look to other people over the risk of infection.
The judge’s rational test then doesn’t hold water. NDZ and company should have an easy time in the appeal.
We’ll probably see the end of lockdown after two weeks and then the inevitable spike in deaths COVID-19 deaths as the virus rips through our population. It’s fine, this was always going to happen in the absence of a vaccine or cure.
We’ll soon be exactly where Sweden is now, but at least knowing that we tried our absolute best to limit the devastating effect of the virus. We will lose this battle because we need to not live in fear.
Your children will be fine. We need to open the primary schools if we want to reopen the economy because you won’t be at home to look after your kids when you’re at work.
We need to live with this virus now and I suspect government is going to err on the side of bureaucracy to make it very difficult to conduct ourselves in our usual fashion. I’m totally fine with that because our usual fashion got us into the masks in the first place.
