South Africa’s Lessons For America’s COVID-19 Denialism – By Renee Schatteman (US News) / Dec 28 2020
The African nation’s experience confronting AIDS shows the deadly dangers of neglect and misinformation at the highest levels of government.
At a time when the U.S. is experiencing one of the worst COVID-19 infection rates among wealthy nations, Americans could take some cautionary lessons from South Africa, the nation that fared the worst during the HIV/AIDS epidemic because of the many stumbles and mistakes of its different governments.
Some South African authors, like Phaswane Mpe and Sindiwe Magona, whose work I study and teach, have written about the tragic effects of a country steeped in denialism about the virus, the ramifications of which are still being felt today.
In 2019, 7.7 million South Africans were HIV positive and the HIV prevalence among adults ages 15 to 49 was a staggering 20%. A multiyear study tells an even more sobering story: Between 1997 and 2010, as many as 2.8 million South Africans died of HIV/AIDS-related causes – an average of over 200,000 deaths per year.
These numbers were once incomprehensible to Americans – that is, until 2020, when the U.S. lost over 300,000 people to the coronavirus. The truth about what can happen in the absence of a carefully calibrated public health plan became painfully clear.
