Making ends meet: spatial and socio-economic variations during the 2020- 2021 Covid-19 Lockdown in South Africa

Résumé

To mitigate the ravages of Covid-19, governments across the world imposed limitations on human movement from early 2020 onwards. In South Africa, as elsewhere, such limitations were framed as aiming to achieve a delicate balance between saving lives and livelihoods. One way to test the impact on livelihoods is to look at various socio-economic metrics, and their spatial patterns over time. We draw on data from the UJ-HSRC national Covid-19 Democracy Survey, a weighted, nationally representative sample (n = 38 785), collected from April 2020 to July 2021. Data from four iterations of the survey are used. We assess changes in the socio- economic and psycho-social conditions experienced by the adult population in South Africa, indicative that the experience of socio-economic distress far exceeded the epidemiological impact of the pandemic. Whereas infection rates during this peak period of the pandemic reached about 5% of the population, with provincial variation between 2% and 7%, experience of hunger and/or fear affected more than one-third. We find that feelings of fear were dominant in those areas where livelihoods were most affected by the pandemic, ostensibly caused by uncertainties related to job and income losses reported by a large number of respondents in the economic hubs of the country. Regarding economic distress, results indicated decreases in the large metropolitan areas of Johannesburg and Cape Town, but increases in other parts of the country. The results are significant in providing insight to changing distress levels, which is important for planning for distress relief allocation efforts.

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