There’s a concerning conversation starter doing the rounds that I’m sure you’ve encountered: “Are you going to get the vaccine when it is available?”
A thousand times YES.
If you still have vaccine fears in 2021, I recommend you audit your news sources. You can’t say you want normal (pre-pandemic) life back and then object to the only known method to get virus transmission under control.
If you extrapolate the one percent mortality rate of COVID-19 over the South African population, that’s over 500 000 people who will lose their lives to this pandemic if we allow the virus to run rampant through our nation.
That would take around four years to achieve losing lives at the current rate of 400 people per day, not mentioning the close on 30 000 family members that have been stripped from society to date. The effect on the economy will be more devastating than lockdown because losing breadwinners condemns many to a life of poverty.
There’s already a crisis brewing in the education sector with three hundred fewer teachers reporting for duty in the 2021 school year than in 2020. Student numbers, however, continue to climb which puts the next generation of learners at a significant disadvantage which further compounds the disruptions caused by the pandemic last year.
Video conference virtual classrooms are going to be with us for the foreseeable future if current trends continue and that is not an ideal situation to learn in.
Our generation had no great war to unite our country behind, instead our great contribution to the future of South Africa will be two shots in the arm.
And don’t get lost in the semantics of who gets it first. If the private medical aid clients get firsts dibs through a more capable supply chain, so be it. The objective is to reach 67 percent population coverage and achieve true herd immunity. Your vaccine protects you and your loved ones, whatever way you slice it.
There is no reason to even ask the question about whether you will get the vaccine, the only way forward is to take it the moment you can get it.
