In less than a week South Africans have begun adapting to the declaration of a global pandemic, a national state of disaster and the immediate and widespread disruption to our daily lives. The World Health Organisation’s declaration on 13 March 2020 that the global Covid-19 outbreak constituted a pandemic was as a result of the speed and scale of the transmission of the coronavirus. Thousands of new cases are being recorded daily across the planet. The number of unrecorded cases is unknown, but the limited capacity for testing suggests that the numbers are likely much, much higher than the verified cases on record.