Day Zero: The Dangers of Drought
Day Zero is the phrase describing the water crisis in the Western Cape. This lack of water has so many more consequences than just the thirst. In the KwaZulu-Natal Hospital in South Africa, with water scarce and reserved for drinking, hand washing is scarce. Patients with infectious disease traveling to the hospital have not washed their hands; physicians that perform several surgeries do not wash their hands between days much less surgeries. Disease in a hospital, a previous haven to contain, epidemics are now helping to spread disease. If water not reserved for drinking is used for hygiene, it is usually untreated groundwater.
This lack of water is due to many reasons, not only the small amount of rain in the area, but also the lack of government infrastructure. The Water Service Commission said that, under the municipal authority, they had trouble with cost inefficiencies, sustainable services, and lack of labor skills. Another suspicion among the effected population is the sabotage of their water supply network. This issue then gained the investigation of the South African Human Rights Commission since a right to water is a basic human right. This combination of causes of water scarcity has caused much more than just thirst; it has sparked the area to be called “Day Zero”, described as “the first place the salient date of a disease-borne humanitarian disaster.”
Due to the spread of disease, this article can be related back to epidemics. The probability of infecting someone, p, and the number of people an infected person comes into contact with, k, are severely increasing in a scenario like this. Due to decreases in hygiene due to no washing, the probability in infected someone is increasing greatly. And especially in a hospital, the number of other infected people coming into contact with others is also increasing. These increases then lead to increases in R0, or the reproductive number. This is dangerous as if R0 becomes larger than 1 then the disease will eventually spread to the entire surrounding population. This effected area could not handle that blow.
The effects of this awful disaster can be discussed with game theory. In the beginning of the class, the Prisoner’s dilemma was explained, the water crisis can be further shown with this game theory model. Confessing, the choice that can either be mediocre or mildly hurtful, would be equivalent to not washing one’s hands. This is because if both oneself and another don’t wash their hands, then they have a higher chance of spreading disease, but more water to drink. If one does wash hands, in a prisoner’s dilemma sense: not confessing, and the other does not wash hands, then there is still water to drink since one person did not wash their hands. This scenario is worse for the person who did not wash their hands since they did not get to wash their hands and they got less water. If both choose to wash their hands, then there will no drinking water, but disease will spread less; however, without water, one will still die. People seem to mostly be choosing to “confess”, or not wash their hands, which is predicted in prisoner’s dilemma models; however, this cause could also be because the citizens have no choice.