Page 146 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Stress Test: The MRC and the Covid-19 Pandemic, 2020–

newspaper noted perceptively, along with at least three others left off the new MAC,
Gray was one of the ‘leading voices in criticising some of the regulations promulgated
by government in response to Covid-19’.
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The weekly calculation of excess deaths was not the only way in which BODRU’s
statistical prowess informed policy-making against the Covid-19 pandemic. Its careful
analysis of Covid-19 deaths revealed which co-morbidities were commonest among
those who succumbed, whether particular segments of the population (e.g. the aged,
schoolchildren, newborns, pregnant women, health-care workers) were especially
at risk of death, and whether higher lockdown levels and bans on the sale of liquor
coincided with lower death rates. This information allowed another intramural research
unit, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs Research Unit (ATODRU), to argue that
forbidding liquor sales would free up over 10,000 hospital beds previously occupied
by trauma patients whose injuries were alcohol-related. These could accommodate
serious Covid-19 cases instead. As the severity of the pandemic and the consequent
need for these beds grew, this information was decisive in persuading the Government
to reimpose restrictions on the sale of liquor after the initial two-month ban was lifted
on 1 June 2020. ‘We were like an arsenal, ready to provide data when called upon at
short notice’, explained ATODRU’s director. The publicity which the unit and the
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MRC received as a result ‘raised the profile of the SAMRC’, and, he acknowledged,
‘stretched our understanding of our work and future research’. 35
Going by its study which found Covid-19 to be more severe among smokers,
ATODRU also backed the Government’s four-month ban on the sale of tobacco
products, though this evidence was probably less decisive, as banning the sale of
tobacco was very much in keeping with the long-standing anti-tobacco stance of the
Cabinet minister who imposed it, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
A third intramural unit, the Biostatistics Research Unit, was also involved in
analysing Covid-19 mortality data, in this case of Stats SA’s figures, in an attempt to help
the National Department of Health identify patterns in mortality. In addition, however,
it participated in the Human Sciences Research Council’s large National COVID
Antibody Survey to try to discover what proportion of the population had been infected
either knowingly or not. The aim was to identify where and why the disease had spread
across the country as it had, and to pass on this sero-prevalence data so as to inform
the National Department of Health’s policy-making. All of this data the Biostatistics
Research Unit drew on to compile two user-friendly Covid-19 dashboards online.
With its consequent spatial-temporal models of how the first wave had spread, this
information was presented to the Government and was, the unit believed, ‘instrumental
in shaping some of the country’s response to the initial epidemic’.
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