South Africa has two weeks to flatten the curve of rapid Covid-19 infections by immediately changing behaviour patterns to include social distancing, or face “an unprecedented epidemic similar to Italy, a total lockdown and a high mortality rate”.

In two weeks, South Africa has gone from having one positive patient who was infected during a skiing trip to Italy, to 116 positive cases — most of them also imported but an increasing number of local transmissions.

Italy’s infections stood at 163 positive patients at week two, not far ahead of South Africa’s 116 positive cases.

World Health Organisation head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday told Africa “to prepare for the worst and prepare today”, as Italy saw 475 deaths in a single day — the highest daily toll in one country throughout the entire pandemic.

Professor Saloshni Naidoo, the head of public health medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, who has worked closely with the teams mandated to handle Covid-19 in the country, said she could not emphasise enough the importance of behaviour change to prevent a wide-scale and unprecedented spread of the virus in the country.

“These next two weeks are vitally important for people to adhere to the president’s recommendations and ensure there is little to no contact with others so we flatten that curve.

“Every person needs to realise that this is their social responsibility. The reality is that 60-70% of the population will get the virus and it will present as a really bad case of the flu and [they will] get over it.

“But what about the other percentage of the population that is already compromised and from lower socio-economic groupings?

“They cannot be put at risk. So at this very point in time, we have to deal with this on a personal level and realise it is not about me or you — it is about a greater social good, our country and our people.

“So what if you miss that wedding or event? There will be another event to enjoy if you exercise caution now,” added Naidoo.

Not wanting to sound alarmist, Naidoo said the reality was that if the immediate behaviour change did not come about, then we could be seeing our first mortality and a huge spike in positive patients.

“We can make a difference. It starts with personal hygiene of washing and sanitising our hands, not touching our faces and keeping a distance of one to two metres from the next person.

“The reason for this is that when an infected person sneezes or coughs, those fluid droplets, that cause the infection in the next person, can travel from one to two metres,” said Naidoo.

She said statistics had proven that with Covid-19, for every one person infected, he or she could infect another two to three people.

“That’s why such stringent measures have been put into place. Our president has acted proactively. He must be commended and now it is up to us to listen.

“Stay at home.

“Only go to work if you absolutely cannot work from home. Keep your children at home — do not take them to the malls, cinema, restaurants. This is not the time for all of that.

“We just need to isolate as much as possible. If we do so now, we will see this through in a month or two. If not, there’s no telling how many people will get infected and how long this will go on for,” said Naidoo.

She urged people not to be complacent and think that it would not affect them. “Each one of us has to take precautions and enforce tight measures and controls.”

At the time of going to print South Africa had 116 confirmed cases, with 31 new cases on Wednesday alone. Sixteen of those cases were in Gauteng, three were from KZN, two from Mpumalanga and 10 from the Western Cape. Six of these cases were from local transmissions and the rest imported from countries patients had travelled to.