We are not out of the woods yet. Far from it. And to be fair to the spokesperson of the National Communication Committee, Zouberr Joomaye, he did not say we were. He did insist, in a sober tone, that we have to maintain our vigilance, as the fact that the tests carried out in the last 72 hours all turned out to be negative does not mean that we have halted the spread of the coronavirus. So, as far as the main message is concerned, Joomaye can’t be blamed for pushing the population into the lion’s den by underplaying the crisis we are going through.

However, the spokesperson did not stop at merely giving the number of people tested negative. He had other very subtle messages to push through. So, he suddenly put on his politician’s hat and started tossing other figures at us: We have so far carried out 8,279 tests in Mauritius in a population of 1.25 million, representing 6,368 per one million inhabitants. Then, he went further and volunteered the figures for South Korea – 5,200 per million inhabitants – and the US – 74 tests per million inhabitants. Anyone who has watched the communication exercise, even without the spin of the MBC, will have felt confident that we are world champions as far as fighting Covid-19 is concerned. So, perhaps there is nothing to worry about after all. Just as there was absolutely nothing to worry about until the second half of March when there wasn’t “a single case of coronavirus in Mauritius!” – dixit Minister of Health Kailesh Jagutpal.

“Why can’t we put our questions to the committee via videoconferencing, Zoom, Skype or any of the commonly available technologies used in other countries? Why can’t they go through  the scrutiny of follow-up questions after the kes savon exercise?”

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I don’t think anyone questioned the figures in short order, as all the relevant statistics are in the public domain from authoritative official sources. So, who would have thought that there would have been such a gross manipulation of figures? Are we really a super country with super health care and surveillance systems and a super government that is handling the epidemic more efficiently than the giants of this world?

The answer came the next day from a citizen writing to Joomaye, exposing the manipulation of figures. It turned out that South Korea has actually carried out 10,000 tests per million inhabitant (twice as many as Joomaye claimed) and the US more than 9,100 instead of the 74 that he looked the nation in the eye and presented, confident that, in the absence of journalists, no one would challenge them.

Apart from the inaccuracy, deliberate or otherwise – I don’t know which is worse – we are never informed about who is being tested. All we hear is a figure with the magic words “contact tracing”.  Are we targeting places where we are likely to find positive cases like elderly care homes, foreign workers piled up in overcrowded dormitories, the 30,000 plus frontliners…?

This gross and gratuitous manipulation of information, in the absence of scrutiny, is very dangerous. If you add this to the news aired on our national broadcaster a couple of days prior to that where it was announced, without anyone blinking, that “Mauritius is one of the rare countries in the world to treat Covid-19 patients”, you start to get an inkling of the extent of dangerous misinformation being dished up to us on a daily basis. This one-sided exercise of propaganda is reinforced by the fact that our questions have to be sent before the spiel and the ones answered hand-picked according to convenience. Why can’t we put our questions to the committee via videoconferencing, Zoom, Skype or any of the commonly available technologies used in other countries? Why can’t they go through the scrutiny of follow-up questions after the kes savon exercise?

If Mauritius is indeed winning the fight against the coronavirus, there is not a single citizen who will not be happy to learn that. No one likes the confinement, anxiety and fear we are living in. But to beat the invisible enemy, the nation needs to be informed properly so that it behaves accordingly. What we are given are figures. What we need are facts. Figures can be consulted on official sites. There is no need to sit in front of the box and wait for a delayed communication exercise. Facts are obtained through journalistic scrutiny. It is called transparency.

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