South Africa’s response to COVID-19: Economically-speaking, between a rock and a hard place

What makes responding to COVID-19 so difficult is that the “correct” response from a medical, clinical perspective and the “correct” response from an economic perspective require different, even opposite, approaches. From a clinical perspective, we need to do everything that we can to stop transmission of the virus. In practice, this means confining people to their homes and putting the country under lockdown. Effectively, this means shutting down economic activity outside of essential services. From an economic perspective, and from a South African economic perspective, we want to ensure that economic activity keeps ticking over and even growing at a time when the economy is already on its knees.