PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday defended the COVID-19 lockdown and its regulations, saying the government’s mitigation strategy assisted to flatten the curve and avoid over 40 000 deaths as predicted by expert modellers.
Opposition parties grilled Ramaphosa on some of the lockdown regulations during a virtual sitting of Parliament, with the Democratic Alliance calling for him to scrap the lockdown altogether because it was serving no purpose and killing SA’s economy.
Ramaphosa responded by saying that if government did not impose the lockdown, ‘we would be speaking about thousands of South Africans having died. Our infection rate would have been much higher than it is. The World Health Organization, United Nations and the Africa Centre for Disease Control have complimented our measures and praised us for flattening the curve.”
‘The lockdown gave us the ability to manage the virus [from spreading],” said Ramaphosa.
“As I indicated in the earlier reply,
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