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

To mitigate the ravages of COVID-19, governments across the world imposed limitations on human movement from early 2020 onwards. Such limitations were framed as aiming to achieve a balance between saving lives and livelihoods. One way to test the impact on livelihoods is to look at socio-economic metrics, and their spatial patterns over time. We draw on data from the UJ-HSRC national COVID-19 Democracy Survey, a nationally representative sample (n = 38 785), collected from April 2020 to July 2021. Changes in socio-economic and psycho-social conditions experienced by the adult population in South Africa are assessed. Whereas infection rates during this peak period of the pandemic reached about 5% of the population, with provincial variation between 2% and 7%, the experience of hunger and/or fear affected more than one-third. Feelings of fear were dominant in those areas where livelihoods were most affected by the pandemic. In terms of economic distress, results in successive survey rounds indicated decreases in the large metropolitan areas, but increases in other parts of the country. We claim that heavy-handed government mandated prohibitions could have been mitigated by nuanced, differential mitigatory regulations that factored in the diverse socio-economic conditions in a country such as South Africa.