By Patrick Guramatunhu- “854 PCR tests done today (Wednesday), with the positivity at 2 percent. All 17 are local cases.
25 new recoveries reported: National Recovery rate stands at 94,5 percent and active cases go down to 212. As of 4 November 2020, Zimbabwe has now recorded 8427 Cases 7967 recoveries and 248 Deaths,” said the Ministry of Heath and Child Care.
Zimbabwe has not been testing for corona virus and so the extend of the virus in the community is an unknown. Zimbabwe has hardly ever carried out 1 000 tests per day even at the time when the official corona virus cases were high.
American has done a pretty good job of testing but not so well in tracing and isolating; the country has nearly 9.6 million cases and nearly 1/4 million deaths out of a population of 330 million. So less than 0.1% of the population in the US has died of corona virus. Even if this figure was ten times or 1% in Zimbabwe, it is easy to see how the corona virus death can easily be attributed to other causes.
Zimbabwe and the world at large is thankful that the corona virus has not been as deadly as ebola.
Corona virus has not only been a serious threat to one’s health and life it has also caused serious disruption to economic activities. Some economic sectors such as the air travel industry has laid off staff and scrapped many of the planes.
Many industrialised nation are projecting their economy will shrink by as much as 10% this year and the economic recovery to pre-covid 19 level will take 10 years or more.
For Zimbabwe the effect of covid-19 cannot be assessed in terms how much the economy will shrink because there was not much economic activity before the corona virus pandemic. The country’s economic was all but destroyed in the period 2000 to 2008 as a consequences of the collapse of the country’s agricultural sector and the hyper inflation soaring to 500 billion percent. The economy has never recovered.
Before the corona virus pandemic unemployment was already a nauseating 90% plus, basic services such as education and health care were barely functioning and 34% of the population was already living in extreme poverty.
A number of Zimbabweans who had left the country as political and/or economic refugees have been forced to return after the pandemic outbreak. These people will not be returning so time soon as there will be few employment opportunities in those nations whilst they too try to recover. The returnees will only swell up Zimbabwe’s mountain of unemployed.
By the end of 2019, two years after Mnangagwa seized power in the November 2017 military and launched his “Zimbabwe is open for business!”, it was clear the much hope for flood of investors would never materialise. Investors could see that Zimbabwe was still a pariah state ruled by corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and murderous thugs. And so they shied away.
Zanu PF has once again resorted to printing money to pay its bills feeling inflation which has soared to 838%. Education and health care have now but completely collapsed as government has failed to pay the teachers and health care workers a living wage. By the end of the years the number of Zimbabweans living in extreme poverty will have surged way above 34%!
The economic situation in Zimbabwe is simply intolerable. There is no future in this!
Zimbabwe’s economic mess is largely a man-made problem as it is the consequences of 40 years of Zanu PF gross mismanagement and rampant corruption. If Zimbabwe had been a healthy and functioning democracy, the people would have removed Zanu PF from power decades ago. Zanu PF has routinely rig the elections to stay in power and the people have wrung their hands in helpless despair.
As long as Zimbabwe remains a pariah state there will be no meaningful economic recovery. None!
Zanu PF has dragged this nation to the very edge of the abyss; if the people do not end the dictatorship now, time is running out, the regime will drag them over the edge! And the people will only have themselves to blame for it because it has always been in their power to end the dictatorship if they really wanted to!
Thank God, corona virus has not been as deadly as Ebola. Still its economic footprint is huge, millions more Zimbabweans now live in extreme poverty and, without a competent government, the country’s future is grime.