South Africa's Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) on COVID recently sent a memo to Health Minister Joe Phaahla urging him to order the discontinuation of quarantining of contacts of those who were confirmed to be infected with the Omicron variant because "it is no longer viable in the current social and economic climate." The committee added that contact tracing was no longer necessary and should be halted immediately.
According to News 24, the MAC, which is co-chaired by Professors Koleka Mlisana and Marian Jacobs, have decided on a re-evaluation of COVID management after observing several changes to the situation in South Africa since 2020. The MAC argued that more people had developed COVID immunity since last year.
"The proportion of people with immunity to Covid-19 (from infection and/or vaccination) has risen substantially, exceeding 60-80% in several serosurveys [measuring of antibody levels against infectious diseases]," MAC wrote in its memo. The group added that since the pandemic began last year, scientists and health experts have learned more about COVID transmissibility and are now dealing with variants of concern "whose epidemiology differs from that of the ancestral strains of SARS-CoV-2."
The committee said that current efforts to eliminate or contain COVID are "not likely to be successful" and concluded that containment efforts such as quarantine and contact tracing must be re-evaluated. The MAC remarked that "quarantining was no longer effective for containing the spread" of COVID" because there were merely a small number of contacts gathered from a proportionally small number of COVID cases in the country.
Meanwhile, the MAC also argued against COVID testing, reasoning that it was more geared towards detecting symptomatic cases and not asymptomatic ones, which are the majority of cases in the region and that also go undetected.
The MAC argued that among the small number of symptomatic COVID cases, testing is not being done as often as it should be either because patients are experiencing mild symptoms or because testing is "burdensome and expensive." Specifically, the MAC said,
"In addition, among the small proportion of symptomatic cases, testing is far from universal, since patients may not seek testing when their symptoms are mild and when testing would be burdensome and expensive."
They added that COVID testing is also "suboptimal, sometimes leading to false negative results."
The committee said that the current testing strategy fails to identify most cases, as illustrated by the high COVID seropositivity rates in several provinces, implying that a small number of cases are diagnosed.
The committee argued that because the vast majority of COVID cases remain undiagnosed and their contacts remain undiagnosed as well, measures such as quarantining and contact tracing "are of negligible public health benefit in the South African setting."
The MAC argued that quarantining causes "a substantial economic and social burden" and causes staffing shortages in critical places such as healthcare facilities. It also impacts South Africa's economic growth, as it reduces economic and governmental activities because of the number of people who are forced to leave their work to quarantine for 10 days. MAC spoke out about the disadvantages of prolonged quarantine, which includes "loss of income, loss of employment, and loss of schooling time."
As per The Gateway Pundit, the MAC then proposed to immediately cease quarantining for contacts of those who were infected with COVID, regardless of their vaccination status. The MAC wrote in the emo that "No testing for COVID-19 is required irrespective of the exposure risk, unless the contact becomes symptomatic. We further propose that contact tracing be stopped."
