Roze Phillips

Only 49% of South Africans say they will get vaccinated within a year, the Edelman Trust Barometer reports. Fearing exposure to the coronavirus, other employees do not want to be in the same workplace environment. Customers have similar fears. How can and should companies respond? Make the vaccine mandatory and fire unvaccinated staff, overriding individual rights? Ignore the concerns of other staff and customers, possibly endangering their health, and risk alienating them?

With domestic violence escalating during COVID-19 lockdowns, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against girls and women a “second pandemic” raging in our country. Our nation has one of the world's highest rates of rape and femicide, and recently, several brutal killings have caused horror and public outcry.

Every year Oxford Dictionaries selects its “word of the year”, normally a word or expression that has attracted a great deal of interest over the previous 12 months. In 2019 it chose the term “climate emergency” — a self-explanatory choice. In the last few weeks something happened that has changed the world as we know it. Towards the end of December a novel coronavirus that causes a respiratory illness called Covid-19 broke out in Wuhan, the ninth most populous city in China with 11-million people.